Quantifying Social Influence Using Semantic Distance John Ohno johno1@unh.newhaven.edu 203.996.6580 Faculty Advisor Dr.

Alice Fischer University of New Haven, West Haven, CT The problem of quantifying social influence is an important one, especially to corporations like Facebook and Google (who benefit greatly by focusing their advertisements on the most influential members of a social group) and to state actors (whose investigations into threats to national security could be accelerated by finding the de-facto mastermind where no ostensible mastermind exists). While there exist some methods for determining which members of a social group are most likely to be socially influential, these largely depend upon assumptions about behavior in the context of group structure, and applications of these methods rely upon self-reporting of social networks. This project instead uses the phenomenon of verbal mirroring behavior to estimate what social influence has already been exerted within a group. Verbal mirroring behavior is accepted as an indicator of identification or empathy. Computational linguistics gives us a very convenient method of quantifying verbal mirroring behavior: semantic distance. By taking a corpus of recorded conversation, then dividing this corpus into sections based on speakers, one can calculate semantic distance between speakers with respect to the whole corpus, and calculate this based on subsets of speaker-corpora aggregated over time. In other words, one can show which speakers remain most stable in their manner of speaking and how much speakers are influenced by each other over time. This allows us to quantify not only the charisma of a given speaker but the dynamics of influence in a group conversation. Our corpus is the logs of the freenode #osdev IRC channel from 1 January, 2000 to 1 January, 2010. We hope that our method will give better results than hub identification and other methods that operate solely on self-reported social network graph characteristics.