SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SOCIAL INFERENCE BASED ON DISTRIBUTED SOCIAL SENSOR SYSTEM

• US 20090282047A1
• Filed: 05/09/2008
• Published: 11/12/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 05/09/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Rekesh, Dmitry A., Lin, Ching-Yung
• Granted Patent: US 8,615,515 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 99/00 Subject matter not provided for in other groups of this subclass

Abstract

A method (and system) for data acquisition includes extracting information from user communications and allowing a user to control the information to be extracted. The method of data acquisition may include downloading a user'"'"'s sent materials from a communication data repository, analyzing the downloaded materials and extracting data portions that are authored by the user, generating statistical values from the extracted data, transmitting the generated statistical values to one or multiple repositories, receiving generated statistical values one or multiple server machines, and aggregating statistical values of multiple users.

Claims

1. A method of data acquisition, comprising:

extracting information from user communications; and

allowing a user to control the information to be extracted.

2. The method according to claim 1, wherein said user communications comprise outgoing user communications.

3. The method according to claim 1, wherein said user communications comprise communications authored by the user.

4. The method according to claim 1, wherein said user communications consist of outgoing user communications authored by the user.

5. The method according to claim 1, wherein said allowing a user to control the information to be extracted comprises controlling an exclude list, said exclude list comprising types of communications that are not allowed to be extracted.

6. The method according to claim 1, further comprising:

allowing the user to manipulate an inferred personal network and expertise of users who transmit statistical values from the user'"'"'s extracted data.

7. A method of data acquisition, comprising:

downloading a user'"'"'s sent materials from a communication data repository;

analyzing the sent materials and extracting data portions that are authored by the user;

generating statistical values from the extracted data;

transmitting the generated statistical values to one or multiple repositories;

receiving the generated statistical values on one or multiple server machines; and

aggregating statistical values of multiple users.

8. The method according claim 7, wherein said downloading a user'"'"'s sent materials uses a scheduler to periodically download data from one or multiple remote servers.

9. The method according claim 7, wherein said downloading a user'"'"'s sent materials uses a user interface to allow the user to manually initiate downloading data from one or multiple remote servers.

10. The method according claim 7, wherein said generating statistical values uses text analysis to extract statistics of words or concatenation of words written by the user in the sent materials.

11. The method according claim 7, wherein the words comprise a stem of words derived from the words written by the user.

12. The method according to claim 7, wherein said aggregating statistical values of multiple users comprises:

inferring a personal social network of each user who transmits the generated statistical values from the user'"'"'s extracted data; and

combining multiple users'"'"' personal social networks to form one or plural combined social networks that include multiple users.

13. The method according to claim 7, wherein said aggregating statistical values of multiple users comprises:

inferring personal expertise of each user who transmits the generated statistical values from the user'"'"'s extracted data; and

combining multiple users'"'"' personal expertise inference to form one or plural repositories of combined expertise inferences that include multiple users.

14. The method according to claim 13, wherein said inferring personal expertise represents a list of words or a list of phrases, associated with weights, to indicate how familiar a user is with the words or phrases.

15. The method according to claim 7, further comprising reading a list of privacy rules to allow users to exclude certain messages, paragraphs, sentences, or words from being extracted,

wherein said reading a list of privacy rules comprises using a user interface to allow a user to manually edit a personal preference list specifying the types of messages to be excluded, the types of paragraphs to be excluded, the types of sentences to be excluded or a set of words to be excluded.

16. The method according to claim 7, wherein said aggregating statistical values of multiple users comprises aggregating statistical values of multiple users to construct one or plural aggregated social networks, expertise inference, or social networks and expertise inference of multiple people including only users or both users and non-users, which comprises:

inferring the personal social network of each user who transmits the generated statistical values from the user'"'"'s explicitly extracted data;

providing a user interface to allow a user to modify the inferred personal social network; and

combining multiple users'"'"' inferred personal social networks to form at least one combined social network that includes multiple users.

17. The method according to claim 7, wherein said aggregating statistical values of multiple users comprises aggregating statistical values of multiple users to construct one or plural aggregated social networks, expertise inference, or social networks and expertise inference of multiple people including only users or both users and non-users, which comprises:

inferring the personal social network of each user who transmits the generated statistical values from the user'"'"'s explicitly extracted data;

combining multiple users'"'"' transmitted data;

inferring non-users'"'"' personal social networks based on combined transmitted data;

providing a user interface to allow a user or a non-user to modify the inferred personal social network; and

forming at least one combined social network that includes multiple users and multiple non-users with or without modification.

18. The method according to claim 15, wherein said reading a list of privacy rules comprises using data mining or data classification methods to classify messages or sentences into one of plural categories to decide the types of message, wherein a message, a sentence, or a paragraph can be belong to only one type or multiple types with confidence values.

19. A distributed social sensor system implemented method for social network inference or expertise location comprising:

installing a software program residing on an individual user'"'"'s machine for downloading the user'"'"'s own sent materials from a communication data repository;

analyzing the downloaded materials and extracting the data portions that are explicitly authored by the user;

generating statistical values from the explicitly extracted data;

transmitting the generated statistical values to one or multiple social sensor server repositories;

installing a software program residing on one or multiple social sensor server repository machines to receive the statistical values of multiple users; and

aggregating the statistical values of multiple users to construct one or plural aggregated social networks, expertise inference, or social networks and expertise inference of multiple people including only users or both users and non-users.