TY - CONF T1 - The Way I Talk to You: Sentiment Expression in an Organizational Context T2 - ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’12) Y1 - 2012 A1 - Jiang Yang A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Wen, Zhen A1 - Lin, Ching-Yung KW - CMC KW - collaborative help KW - online communities AB -

Sentiment is a rich and important dimension of social interaction. However, its presence in computer-mediated communication in corporate settings is not well understood. This paper provides a preliminary study of people’s expression of sentiment in email conversations in an organizational context. The study reveals that sentiment levels evolve over time during the process of newcomers’ socialization, that sentiment varies according to tie-strength with the recipient, and that sentiment patterns can be indicative of one’s position in the corporate social network as well as job performance. These findings shed light on the complex and dynamic nature of sentiment patterns, and would inspire further explorations and applications of sentiment analysis in organizations.

JF - ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’12) UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Collaborating Globally: Culture and Organizational Computer-Mediated Communications T2 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2011) Y1 - 2011 A1 - Jiang Yang A1 - Wen, Zhen A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Lin, Ching-Yung KW - calendaring KW - computer-mediated communication (CMC) KW - cultural studies KW - Instant Messaging (IM) KW - organizational communication KW - sentiment analysis KW - social interaction KW - social networks AB -

Culture shapes interpersonal communication. However, little is known about how culture interacts with computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools in a business context. We present a large-scale empirical study of cultural differences in computer mediated social interactions in a global company. Our dataset includes 9,000 volunteer users and more than 20 million records of their email and Instant Messaging conversations. We compared social network characteristics, preferences for CMC tools, and expression of sentiment across employees working in seven countries. Significant differences emerged and the patterns are consistent with the inherent cultural characteristics as suggested by cultural theories. In addition, we uncover the complex manner in which culture interacts with preference and use of different communication mediums. The existence of pervasive and complex cultural differences, points to the need to understand and account for such differences in designing cross-cultural collaborative systems.

JF - Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2011) UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Culture Matters: A Survey Study of Social Q&A Behavior T2 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’11) Y1 - 2011 A1 - Jiang Yang A1 - Morris, Meredith Ringel A1 - Jaime Teevan A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - collaborative help KW - collective help KW - intercultural KW - QA KW - social search AB -

Online social networking tools are used around the world by people to ask questions of their friends, because friends provide direct, reliable, contextualized, and interactive responses. However, although the tools used in different cultures for question asking are often very similar, the way they are used can be very different, reflecting unique inherent cultural characteristics. We present the results of a survey designed to elicit cultural differences in people’s social question asking behaviors across the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and India. The survey received responses from 933 people distributed across the four countries who held similar job roles and were employed by a single organization. Responses included information about the questions they ask via social networking tools, and their motivations for asking and answering questions online. The results reveal culture as a consistently significant factor in predicting people’s social question and answer behavior. The prominent cultural differences we observe might be traced to people’s inherent cultural characteristics (e.g., their cognitive patterns and social orientation), and should be comprehensively considered in designing social search systems.

JF - Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’11) UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Rating Friends Without Making Enemies T2 - Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media Y1 - 2011 A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Lauterbach, Debra A1 - Teng, CY A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - couch surfing KW - e-communities KW - friends KW - online communities KW - rating systems KW - trust AB -

As online social networks expand their role beyond maintaining existing relationships, they may look to more faceted ratings to support the formation of new connections between their users. Our study focuses on one community employing faceted ratings, CouchSurfing.org, and combines data analysis of ratings, a large-scale survey, and in-depth interviews. In order to understand the ratings, we revisit the notions of friendship and trust and uncover an asymmetry: close friendship includes trust, but high levels of trust can be achieved without close friendship. To users, providing faceted ratings presents challenges, including differentiating and quantifying inherently subjective feelings such as friendship and trust, concern over a friend’s reaction to a rating, and knowledge of how ratings can affect others’ reputations. One consequence of these issues is the near absence of negative feedback, even though a small portion of actual experiences and privately held ratings are negative. We show how users take this into account when formulating and interpreting ratings, and discuss designs that could encourage more balanced feedback.

JF - Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Virtual Gifts and Guanxi: Supporting Social Exchange in a Chinese Online Community T2 - Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer–Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’11) Y1 - 2011 A1 - Jiang Yang A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Lada A. Adamic KW - Chinese culture KW - gift KW - guanxi KW - inter-cultural studies KW - online community KW - reciprocity KW - social exchange KW - social interactions KW - virtual points AB -

Significant cultural differences persist between East and West. Software systems that have been proven to operate efficiently within one culture can fail in the context of the other, especially if they are intended to support rich social interactions. In this paper we demonstrate how a virtual currency system, not unlike ones employed by many US-based websites, evolved within a thriving Chinese online forum into an essential medium for extremely diverse and culturally specific social exchange activities. The social interactions reflect the traditional Chinese idea of guanxi, or interpersonal influence and connectedness, while at the same time incorporating the norms of a new generation of Internet users.

JF - Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer–Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW’11) UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Activity lifespan: An analysis of user survival patterns in online knowledge sharing communities T2 - International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’10) Y1 - 2010 A1 - Jiang Yang A1 - Wei, Xiao A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Lada A. Adamic KW - community evolution KW - e-communities KW - intercultural KW - online communities KW - Q&A KW - QA communities KW - survival analysis AB -

Retaining participation is crucial for information services, online knowledge sharing services among them. We present the first comprehensive analysis of users’ activity lifespan across three predominant online knowledge sharing communities. Extending previous work focusing on initial interactions of new users, we use survival analysis to quantify participation patterns that can be used to predict individual lifespan over the long term. We discuss how cross site differences in user participation and the underlying factors can be related to differences in system design and culture. We conduct a longitudinal comparison of the communities’ evolvement between two distinct stages, the initial days just after the site launch and one year later. We also observe that sub communities corresponding to different topics differ in their ability to sustain users. All results reveal the complexity and diversity in users’ engagement to a site and design implications are discussed.

JF - International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM’10) UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Questions in, Knowledge iN? A study of Naver’s Question Answering Community T2 - ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’09) Y1 - 2009 A1 - Kevin K. Nam A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Lada A. Adamic KW - collective help KW - expertise finding KW - information access KW - online communities KW - Q&A communities KW - QA KW - question-answering KW - social computing AB -

Large general-purposed community question-answering sites are becoming popular as a new venue for generating knowledge and helping users in their information needs. In this paper we analyze the characteristics of knowledge generation and user participation behavior in the largest question-answering online community in South Korea, Naver Knowledge-iN. We collected and analyzed over 2.6 million question/answer pairs from fifteen categories between 2002 and 2007, and have interviewed twenty six users to gain insights into their motivations,roles, usage and expertise. We find altruism, learning, and competency are frequent motivations for top answerers to participate, but that participation is often highly intermittent. Using a simple measure of user performance, we find that higher levels of participation correlate with better performance. We also observe that users are motivated in part through a point system to build a comprehensive knowledge database. These and other insights have significant implications for future knowledge generating online communities.

JF - ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’09) UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Competing to Share Expertise: The Taskcn Knowledge Sharing Community. T2 - ICWSM Y1 - 2008 A1 - Jiang Yang A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - competitions KW - e-commerce KW - e-communities KW - marketplaces KW - online communities KW - participation structures AB -

"Witkeys" are websites in China that form a rapidly growing web-based knowledge market. A user who posts a task also offers a small fee, and many other users submit their answers to compete. The Witkey sites fall in-between aspects of the now-defunct Google Answers (vetted experts answer questions for a fee) and Yahoo Answers (anyone can answer or ask a question). As such, these sites promise new possibilities for knowledge-sharing online communities, perhaps fostering the freelance marketplace of the future. In this paper, we investigate one of the biggest Witkey websites in China, Taskcn.com. In particular, we apply social network prestige measures to a novel construction of user and task networks based on competitive outcomes to discover the underlying properties of both users and tasks. Our results demonstrate the power of this approach: Our analysis allows us to infer relative expertise of the users and provides an understanding of the participation structure in Taskcn. The results suggest challenges and opportunities for this kind of knowledge sharing medium.

JF - ICWSM UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Crowdsourcing and Knowledge Sharing: Strategic User Behavior on Taskcn T2 - Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce Y1 - 2008 A1 - Jiang Yang A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - contests KW - crowdsourcing KW - e-commerce KW - knowledge market KW - learning KW - online communities KW - question-answer sites KW - virtual communities KW - witkey AB -

Witkeys are a thriving type of web-based knowledge sharing market in China, supporting a form of crowdsourcing. In a Witkey site, users offer a small award for a solution to a task, and other users compete to have their solution selected.

In this paper, we examine the behavior of users on one of the biggest Witkey websites in China, Taskcn.com. On Taskcn, we observed several characteristics in users' activity over time. Most users become inactive after only a few submissions. Others keep attempting tasks. Over time, users tend to select tasks where they are competing against fewer opponents to increase their chances of winning. They will also, perhaps counterproductively, select tasks with higher expected rewards. Yet, on average, they do not increase their chances of winning, and in some categories of tasks, their chances actually decrease. This does not paint the full picture, however, because there is a very small core of successful users who manage not only to win multiple tasks, but to increase their win-to-submission ratio over time. This core group proposes nearly 20% of the winning solutions on the site. The patterns we observe on Taskcn, we believe, hold clues to the future of crowdsourcing and freelance marketplaces, and raise interesting design implications for such sites.

JF - Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce PB - ACM CY - New York, NY, USA SN - 978-1-60558-169-9 UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Knowledge Sharing and Yahoo Answers: Everyone Knows Something T2 - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web Y1 - 2008 A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Zhang, Jun A1 - Bakshy, Eytan A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - expertise finding KW - expertise sharing KW - help seeking KW - knowledge sharing KW - online communities KW - Q&A communities KW - QA communities KW - question answering KW - social network analysis AB -

Yahoo Answers (YA) is a large and diverse question-answer forum, acting not only as a medium for sharing technical knowledge, but as a place where one can seek advice, gather opinions, and satisfy one's curiosity about a countless number of things. In this paper, we seek to understand YA's knowledge sharing and activity. We analyze the forum categories and cluster them according to content characteristics and patterns of interaction among the users. While interactions in some categories resemble expertise sharing forums, others incorporate discussion, everyday advice, and support. With such a diversity of categories in which one can participate, we find that some users focus narrowly on specific topics, while others participate across categories. This not only allows us to map related categories, but to characterize the entropy of the users' interests. We find that lower entropy correlates with receiving higher answer ratings, but only for categories where factual expertise is primarily sought after. We combine both user attributes and answer characteristics to predict, within a given category, whether a particular answer will be chosen as the best answer by the asker.

JF - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - CommunityNetSimulator: Using simulations to study online community networks T2 - Communities and Technologies 2007 Y1 - 2007 A1 - Zhang, Jun A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Lada A. Adamic KW - community dynamics KW - community strucure KW - incentive structures KW - online communities KW - Q&A communities KW - QA communities KW - reward structures KW - simulation AB -

Help-seeking communities have been playing an increasingly critical role the way people seek and share information online, forming the basis for knowledge dissemination and accumulation. Consider:

❑ About.com, a popular help site (http://about.com), boasts 30 million distinct users each month

❑ Knowledge-iN, a Korean site (http://kin.naver.com/), has accumulated 1.5 million question and answers.

Many additional sites exist from online stock trading discussions to medicaladvice communities. These range from simple text-based newsgroups to intricate immersive virtual reality multi-user worlds. Unfortunately, the very size of these communities may impede an individual’s ability to find relevant answers or advice. Which replies were written by experts and which by novices? As these help-seeking communities are also often primitive technically, they often cannot help the user distinguish between e.g. expert and novice advice. We would therefore like to find mechanisms to augment their functionality and social life. Research is proceeding to make use of the available structure in online communities to design new systems and  algorithms (e.g., [4], [10]). These are largely focused on social network characteristics of these communities.

However, differing network structures and dynamics will affect possible algorithms that attempt to make use of these networks, but little is known of these impacts.

Accordingly, we developed a CommunityNetSimulator (CNS), a simulator that combines various network models, as well as various new social network analysis techniques that are useful to study online community (or virtual organization) network formation and dynamics.

JF - Communities and Technologies 2007 PB - Springer UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - Expertise networks in online communities: structure and algorithms T2 - Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web (WWW'07) Y1 - 2007 A1 - Zhang, Jun A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Lada A. Adamic KW - expert locators KW - expertise finding KW - help seeking KW - online communities KW - simulation KW - social network analysis AB -

Web-based communities have become important places for people to seek and share expertise. We find that networks in these communities typically differ in their topology from other online networks such as the World Wide Web. Systems targeted to augment web-based communities by automatically identifying users with expertise, for example, need to adapt to the underlying interaction dynamics. In this study, we analyze the Java Forum, a large online help-seeking community, using social network analysis methods. We test a set of network-based ranking algorithms, including PageRank and HITS, on this large size social network in order to identify users with high expertise. We then use simulations to identify a small number of simple simulation rules governing the question-answer dynamic in the network. These simple rules not only replicate the structural characteristics and algorithm performance on the empirically observed Java Forum, but also allow us to evaluate how other algorithms may perform in communities with different characteristics. We believe this approach will be fruitful for practical algorithm design and implementation for online expertise-sharing communities.
 

JF - Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web (WWW'07) PB - ACM UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - QuME: A Mechanism to Support Expertise Finding in Online Help-seeking Communities T2 - Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST'07) Y1 - 2007 A1 - Zhang, Jun A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Lada A. Adamic A1 - Kevin K. Nam KW - cscw KW - expertise finding KW - expertise location KW - social networks AB -

Help-seeking communities have been playing an increasingly critical role in the way people seek and share information. However, traditional help-seeking mechanisms of these online communities have some limitations. In this paper, we describe an expertise-finding mechanism that attempts to alleviate the limitations caused by not knowing users' expertise levels. As a result of using social network data from the online community, this mechanism can automatically infer expertise level. This allows, for example, a question list to be personalized to the user's expertise level as well as to keyword similarity. We believe this expertise location mechanism will facilitate the development of next generation help-seeking communities.

JF - Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST'07) UR - Complete ER -