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We look at the underlying friendships and relationships between Chinese Internet users. We identify the presence and characteristics of the different types of online friendships and online relationships by analyzing various online social networks. First, we look at the concept of guanxi as it is applied to the interaction between web sites. Guanxi is a type of dyadic social interaction based on feelings and trust which has been well studied by scholars in China. We define guanxi in the web: particular linking patterns that appear in the web as well as supporting textual evidence in the web pages which we believe are indicative of the presence and varying strengths of the underlying guanxi between Chinese web site owners. Through our empirical study of the Chinese web, the general web, and the Japanese, Iranian, and French web, we show that guanxi between web sites is a more prevalent feature in the Chinese web. Next, we study the formation of online friendships in Douban, an online social networking platform frequently used by the youth in China. We look at several factors that can affect the evolution of friendships such as having memberships in the same discussion groups and sharing common interests or common friends. We compare these factors in influencing the formation of online friendships. Our work provides the first study on the underlying relationships between web sites in the Chinese web and the first large scale empirical analysis on the evolution of friendships in a Chinese online social network.

<p>Nowadays an increasing number of people consume, share, and interact with information online. This results in posting and counter-posting on online media by different ideological groups on various polarized topics. Consequently, online media has become the primary platform for political and social influencers to directly interact with the citizens and share their perspectives, views, and stances with the goal of gaining support for their actions, bills, and legislation. Hence, understanding the perspectives and the influencing strategies in online media texts is important for an individual to avoid misinformation and improve trust between the general people and the influencers and the authoritative figures such as the government.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Automatically understanding the perspectives in online media is difficult because of two major challenges. Firstly, the proper grammar or mechanism to characterize the perspectives is not available. Recent studies in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have leveraged resources from social science to explain perspectives. For example, Policy Framing and Moral Foundation Theory are used for understanding how issues are framed and the moral appeal expressed in texts to gain support. However, these theories often fail to capture the nuances in perspectives and cannot generalize over all topics and events. Our research in this dissertation is one of the first studies that adapt social science theories in Natural Language Processing for understanding perspectives to the extent that they can capture differences in ideologies or stances. The second key challenge in understanding perspectives in online media texts is that annotated data is difficult to obtain to build automatic methods to detect the perspectives, that can generalize over the large corpus of online media text on different topics. To tackle this problem, in this dissertation, we used weak sources of supervision such as social network interaction of users who produce and interact with the messages, weak human interaction, or artificial few-shot data using Large Language Models. </p> <p><br></p> <p>Our insight is that various tasks such as perspectives, stances, sentiments toward entities, etc. are interdependent when characterizing online media messages. As a result, we proposed approaches that jointly model various interdependent problems such as perspectives, stances, sentiments toward entities, etc., and perform structured prediction to solve them jointly. Our research findings showed that the messaging choices and perspectives on online media in response to various real-life events and their prominence and contrast in different ideological camps can be efficiently captured using our developed methods.</p>

Effective knowledge sharing within project teams is critical to knowledge-intensive professional service firms. Prior research studies indicate a positive association between trust, social-cognitive factors, and effective knowledge sharing among co-workers. The conceptual framework proposed here builds on these studies, and draws from theoretical foundations from the organizational behavior, psychology, information studies, sociology, and management literature on organizational trust and knowledge sharing, and identifies the most significant factors found to influence organizational knowledge sharing directly and indirectly through trust. The study makes methodological contributions in the form of conceptualizations for knowledge sharing behavior, trust, and tie strength. Also, it provides a more nuanced and focused analysis, by factoring for knowledge type and co-worker working relationship. Data were collected from 275 knowledge workers (‘legal professionals’ and paralegals) engaged in shared legal project work, at one of Canada’s largest multijurisdictional law firms. The nature of their work required a significant reliance on co-workers, for both explicit and tacit knowledge. Multiple regression analysis, among other statistical techniques, was used to test the hypotheses and determine significant relationships. Of the factors examined in the study, the three found to have the strongest effect on respondents’ trust in their co-workers were shared vision, shared language, and tie strength. Furthermore, the two factors found to have the strongest effect on organizational knowledge sharing behavior were trust and shared vision. Overall trust was also found to have a mediating effect between shared vision and knowledge sharing behavior, and between shared language and knowledge sharing behavior. A significant implication for practitioners is that effective knowledge sharing among co-workers requires a nurturing manager to work on developing co-worker trust and shared vision. Furthermore, a manager wanting to promote trust between co-workers must nurture shared language and shared vision.

Effective knowledge sharing within project teams is critical to knowledge-intensive professional service firms. Prior research studies indicate a positive association between trust, social-cognitive factors, and effective knowledge sharing among co-workers. The conceptual framework proposed here builds on these studies, and draws from theoretical foundations from the organizational behavior, psychology, information studies, sociology, and management literature on organizational trust and knowledge sharing, and identifies the most significant factors found to influence organizational knowledge sharing directly and indirectly through trust. The study makes methodological contributions in the form of conceptualizations for knowledge sharing behavior, trust, and tie strength. Also, it provides a more nuanced and focused analysis, by factoring for knowledge type and co-worker working relationship. Data were collected from 275 knowledge workers (‘legal professionals’ and paralegals) engaged in shared legal project work, at one of Canada’s largest multijurisdictional law firms. The nature of their work required a significant reliance on co-workers, for both explicit and tacit knowledge. Multiple regression analysis, among other statistical techniques, was used to test the hypotheses and determine significant relationships. Of the factors examined in the study, the three found to have the strongest effect on respondents’ trust in their co-workers were shared vision, shared language, and tie strength. Furthermore, the two factors found to have the strongest effect on organizational knowledge sharing behavior were trust and shared vision. Overall trust was also found to have a mediating effect between shared vision and knowledge sharing behavior, and between shared language and knowledge sharing behavior. A significant implication for practitioners is that effective knowledge sharing among co-workers requires a nurturing manager to work on developing co-worker trust and shared vision. Furthermore, a manager wanting to promote trust between co-workers must nurture shared language and shared vision.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This research project proposes to try to isolate and measure the influence of “regime fatigue” on gubernatorial elections and senatorial elections in the United States where there is no incumbent running. The research begins with a review of the negativity effect and its potential influence on schema-based impression forming by voters. Applicable literature on the topics of social clustering and homophily is then highlighted as it provides the vehicle through which the negativity effect disseminates across collections of socially-clustered individuals and ultimately contributes to changing tides of public opinion despite the fact that the political party identification can remain relatively fixed in the aggregate.