Battelle Memorial Institute

Andrew J Cowell

Michelle L Gregory

Eric B Bell

Ryan E Hohimer

Deborah A Payne

Shawn J Bohn

Antonio P Sanfilippo

Stephen C Tratz

Robert L Baddeley

Patrick R Paulson

David W Engel

Eric J Marshall

Andrew W Piatt

Online abstract groups, in which members aren't explicitly connected, can be automatically identified by computer-implemented methods. The methods involve harvesting records from social media and extracting content-based and structure-based features from each record. Each record includes a social-media posting and is associated with one or more entities. Each feature is stored on a data storage device and includes a computer-readable representation of an attribute of one or more records. The methods further involve grouping records into record groups according to the features of each record. Further still the methods involve calculating an n-dimensional surface representing each record group and defining an outlier as a record having feature-based distances measured from every n-dimensional surface that exceed a threshold value. Each of the n-dimensional surfaces is described by a footprint that characterizes the respective record group as an online abstract group.

Automatic identification of abstract online groups

Desired content, metadata, or both can be isolated from the full content of social media websites having content-rich pages. Achieving this can include obtaining from the content-rich pages a language-independent representation having a hierarchical structure of nodes and then generating a node representation for each node. Feature vectors for the nodes are generated and a label is assigned to each node representation according to a schema. Assignment can occur by executing a trained classification algorithm on the feature vectors. The schema has schema elements and each schema element corresponds to a label. For each schema element, all node representations having matching labels are gathered and then one node representation is elected from among those with matching labels to be assigned to a schema element field in a template. The template can be applied to extract desired content, metadata, or both according to the schema from all the content-rich pages.

Isolating desired content, metadata, or both from social media

Hypothesis analysis methods, hypothesis analysis devices, and articles of manufacture are described according to some aspects. In one aspect, a hypothesis analysis method includes providing a hypothesis, providing an indicator which at least one of supports and refutes the hypothesis, using the indicator, associating evidence with the hypothesis, weighting the association of the evidence with the hypothesis, and using the weighting, providing information regarding the accuracy of the hypothesis.

Hypothesis analysis methods, hypothesis analysis devices, and articles of manufacture

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Kennewick, WA, United States of America

Andrew J Cowell