Introduction to my research and key areas

       

            I decided to share the new things that I learn while doing my research on this blog. Before that, it is essential to give you an idea about a few key areas that I will be writing about. As the blog title says I will be blogging on

·       Crowdsourcing

·       Social Media and Social Media Content Moderation

·       Use of technology in developing different tools

·       

            First, we will look at the key terms or key areas that are involved in my research. I will be using certain contents from my research proposal here.

            Crowdsourcing

            Crowdsourcing is a growing effective way for organizations to gather the best ideas from online communities and use them in ways that benefit both the organization and contributor. Current crowdsourcing campaigns always use social media to obtain a higher number of contributions, in theory leading to different ideas.

            Social Media

            Social media has become a significant force in sharing information, forming opinions and attitudes, etc [1]. Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide with 2.41 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2019. According to the newsroom of Facebook, more than 2.1 billion people use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger every day on average [2].

           Social Media Content Moderation

            The credibility of the information shared in social media is doubtful and how to evaluate the information credibility on the social media platform has become an important issue for today's information consumers [3]. At the same time, the information shared can be offensive and could lead to creating social issues. Social media research includes the analysis of citizen’s voices on a wide range of topics. Some of these topics would have a direct impact on creating social issues. Therefore by incorporating a crowdsourcing approach in Social Media, it is possible to reach a much larger audience and capture the user opinions and behaviors. In social computing research, social media has been shown to provide a unique window into the social experience of people [4].

           

           Use of Technology in Developing  Tools

          Similar to social computing research done given in[4], in our research we focus on identifying a mechanism with the use of direct and indirect crowdsourcing to moderate the social media content by Sri Lankan citizens on various topics in Social Media. A crowdsourcing platform will be implemented to identify and classify the posts if they are related to social issues. Furthermore, the crowdsourcing platform will be used to verify the identified posts identified by the Natural Language Processing(NLP) and Machine Learning(ML) tools developed by my fellow research colleagues.

[1]  Voramontri, Duangruthai & Klieb, Leslie. (2018). “Impact of Social Media on Consumer Behaviour”. International Journal of Information and Decision Sciences. 11. 10.1504/IJIDS.2019.10014191.

[2]  newsroom.fb.com, ‘Stats’, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/. [Accessed: 06- Aug- 2019].

[3]  R. Li and A. Suh, “Factors Influencing Information credibility on Social Media Platforms: Evidence from Facebook Pages,” Procedia Computer Science, vol. 72, pp. 314–328, 2015.

[4]  Tim Finin, Will Murnane, Anand Karandikar, Nicholas Keller, Justin Martineau, and Mark Dredze. 2010. Annotating named entities in Twitter data with crowdsourcing. In Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Creating Speech and Language Data with Amazon's Mechanical Turk(CSLDAMT '10). Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg, PA, USA, 80-88