Thesis Committee

Eugene Santos, Jr., Ph.D. (Chair)

George Cybenko, Ph.D.

Mark Borsuk, Ph.D.

Hien Nguyen, Ph.D.

Abstract

Opinion dynamics is a complex procedure that entails a cognitive process when it deals with how a person integrates influential opinions to form revised opinion. Early research on opinion formation and social influence can be traced back to the eighteenth century. The main research focus back then was to study the conditions of people aggregating information and reaching consensus. Recently, due to the rise of World Wide Web, more and more works tend to model opinion dynamics in large-scale social networks via computational methods. Among those, non-Bayesian rule-of-thumb learning models keep gaining popularity due to its simplicity and computational efficiency. Unlike many non-Bayesian methods that treat individual opinions on various issues as independent beliefs, but overlook the connections between knowledge fragments, we leverage from Bayesian approaches to consider opinions as a product inferred from one's knowledge-based system, where new knowledge fragments are acquired through social interaction and learning experiences. We study how individual evaluates and adopts such knowledge fragments from others sources, both visible and invisible, on the basis of the findings from well-established social theories.

A computational framework is developed to model opinion dynamics, in which we apply a probabilistic model named Bayesian Knowledge Bases to represent an individual's knowledge base. Opinion dynamics is studied through modeling opinion formation as a process of knowledge fusion, learning the impact metric that estimates the reliability of knowledge fragments, and identifying influential sources whose impact patterns are hidden.

The contributions of this work can be summarized as 1) its development of a domain-independent computational method to model opinion formation by emphasizing the dependencies between knowledge pieces, 2) its capability to model different aspects of opinion dynamics in one entire system, 3) its intuitiveness in representing opinions such that the intents behind the opinion change can be readily captured, 4) its ability to characterize the influences in a social community by realizing and enriching theories of social communication, and 5) its flexibility of application on detecting and tracking hidden influential sources