Analysis and visualization of temporal changes in bloggers' activities and interests

Social media such as blogs and microblogs enable users to easily and rapidly publish information on their personal activities and interests. They are considered to provide valuable information from the viewpoints of sociology, linguistics, and marketing. This paper proposes a novel system for analyzing temporal changes in the activities and interests of bloggers through a 3D visualization of phrase dependency structures in sentences. We first extract events that represent bloggers' activities and interests through analyzing the phrase dependencies of sentences in a blog archive. We roughly categorize the retrieved events according to the thematic roles (such as the experiencer, agent, and location) of the noun within the events, and then store them in a dependency database so that we can retrieve events that involve a given topic. Second, we present a 3D visualization framework for exploring temporal changes in events related to a topic. Our framework enables users to find events about a topic that appear within a specific timing, and drill down details of the events. It also enables users to compare events with different timings and/or on multiple topics. Moreover, it allows them to observe an overview of temporal changes in sets of events, and long-term changes in the frequency of events to assist users in finding trends. We implement the proposed system on our own five-year blog archive that focused on Japanese, and we report the usefulness of our system by using various examples.