Abstract

With the well-known success of social media, many different social networking services have been developed. One example of these new services are the educational social networks, which make use of social networking technologies for educational purposes. People sharing certain similarities or affiliates tend to form communities within social media. In educational social networks, several factors lead to agglomeration of users, e.g. studying in the same school or grade, curricular interests in common, etc. These diverse activities leave behind traces of their social life, providing clues to understand changing social structures. In order to explain the group formation resulted from educational social network, we applied a strategy of differentiation-based group profiling, using the Wilcoxon rank-sum test. The performed experiments showed that the method was effective in identifying tags to characterize the groups, pointing tags for 81.81% of groups. This research can assist network navigation, visualization and analysis, as well as monitoring and tracking the ebbs and tides of different groups in evolving networks.

BibTeX

 @inproceedings{Gomes2013,
  author = {Gomes, Jo{\~{a}}o and Prud{\^{e}}ncio, Ricardo and Meira, Luciano and Filho, Alexandre Azevedo and Nascimento, Andr{\'{e}} and Oliveira, Hil{\'{a}}rio},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering},
  keywords = {communities,educational social networks},
  pages = {101--106},
  title = {{Group Profiling for Understanding Educational Social Networking}},
  year = {2013}
  }