Actions Speak as Loud as Words
Actions Speak as Loud as Words
Did you ever think about what types of words you use when speaking to a close friend? How about a colleague who is not so close? When speaking in a professional context, we use different types of words than we are engaged in personal communication. Words tell a lot about our relationships. We can look at words to understand what types of relationships we have with our friends. In fact, words are even used to understand the personality of individuals. For example, the word cloud above shows the types of words more common among friends.
How about actions? What can we tell from the actions? While different users may have hundreds of friends and followers on Twitter, they may not behave/act the same towards them. Some friends they may immediately reply to and some friends they never do. Some friends may forward their messages and some do not. The timing, the reciprocity and the sheer number are all indicators of our relationships with our friends. In our recent WWW paper (Adali_WWW2012.pdf), we develop a large number of indicators of friendship based on actions and a new methodology for comparing actions to words. We show that actions are as good as words in understanding relationships. We can find the same two type of relationships from either actions or text: intimate and formal relationships.
We look at actions and text together and ask the following question: Given just the actions, what are the dominant textual categories that best differentiate between different actions? It turns out, there are exactly two such categories. The graph we found using this method is shown below. The categories to the left are the more formal relationships, while the categories to the right are the more intimate categories. We can also find the dominant behavior for each text category.
We also ask the same question in reverse, looking at just the text, what types of action are most significant in our study. It turns out action to text mapping returns the same two groups either way: the same action maps to same groups of text categories. In fact text and action are equally powerful in understanding the relationships. There are two main categories: intimate and formal relationships. Below is the word cloud for our more formal relationship category.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012