Exploring Interpersonal Influence by Tracking User Dynamic Interactions

As one of the most popular social media platforms today, Twitter provides people with an effective way to communicate and interact with each other. Through these interactions, influence among users gradually emerges and changes people's opinions. Although previous work has studied interpersonal influence as the probability of activating others during information diffusion, they ignore an important fact that information diffusion is the result of influence, while dynamic interactions among users produce influence. In this article, the authors propose a novel temporal influence model to learn users' opinion behaviors regarding a specific topic by exploring how influence emerges during communications. The experiments show that their model performs better than other influence models with different influence assumptions when predicting users' future opinions, especially for the users with high opinion diversity.