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Three Essays on Trust Mining in Online Social Networks Gelareh Towhidi University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

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Three Essays on Trust Mining in Online Social Networks Gelareh Towhidi University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee University of Wisconsin Milwaukee UWM Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations May 2018 Three Essays on Trust Mining in Online Social Networks Gelareh Towhidi University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.uwm.edu/etd Part of the Databases and Information Systems Commons, and the Human Resources Management Commons Recommended Citation Towhidi, Gelareh, "Three Essays on Trust Mining in Online Social Networks" (2018). Theses and Dissertations. 1932. https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/1932 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by UWM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UWM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THREE ESSAYS ON TRUST MINING IN ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS by Gelareh Towhidi A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctoral of Philosophy in Management Science at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee May 2018 ABSTRACT THREE ESSAYS ON TRUST MINING IN ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS by Gelareh Towhidi The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2018 Under the Supervision of Professor Atish P. Sinha and Professor Huimin Zhao This dissertation research consists of three essays on studying trust in online social networks. Trust plays a critical role in online social relationships, because of the high levels of risk and uncertainty involved. Guided by relevant social science and computational graph theories, I develop conceptual and predictive models to gain insights into trusting behaviors in online social relationships. In the first essay, I propose a conceptual model of trust formation in online social networks. This is the first study that integrates the existing graph-based view of trust formation in social networks with socio-psychological theories of trust to provide a richer understanding of trusting behaviors in online social networks. I introduce new behavioral antecedents of trusting behaviors and redefine and integrate existing graph-based concepts to develop the proposed conceptual model. The empirical findings indicate that both socio-psychological and graph-based trust- related factors should be considered in studying trust formation in online social networks. ii In the second essay, I propose a theory-based predictive model to predict trust and distrust links in online social networks. Previous trust prediction models used limited network structural data to predict future trust/distrust relationships, ignoring the underlying behavioral trust-inducing factors. I identify a comprehensive set of behavioral and structural predictors of trust/distrust links based on related theories, and then build multiple supervised classification models to predict trust/distrust links in online social networks. The empirical results confirm the superior fit and predictive performance of the proposed model over the baselines. In the third essay, I propose a lexicon-based text mining model to mine trust related user- generated content (UGC). This is the first theory-based text mining model to examine important factors in online trusting decisions from UGC. I build domain-specific trustworthiness lexicons for online social networks based on related behavioral foundations and text mining techniques. Next, I propose a lexicon-based text mining model that automatically extracts and classifies trustworthiness characteristics from trust reviews. The empirical evaluations show the superior performance of the proposed text mining system over the baselines. iii © Copyright by Gelareh Towhidi, 2018 All Rights Reserved iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................... vii LIST OF TABLES ....................................................................................................................... viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... ix CHAPTER 1 ................................................................................................................................... 1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2 ................................................................................................................................... 5 Essay 1: Trust Formation in Online Social Networks .................................................................... 5 2.1. Introduction .................................................................................................................. 5 2.2. Related Work ............................................................................................................... 9 2.3. Theoretical Background and Hypothesis Development ............................................ 12 Trusting Behavior in Online Social Networks ...................................................... 12 Online Trusting Beliefs ......................................................................................... 13 Network-Based Dispositional Trust ...................................................................... 15 Network-Based Judgment Bias ............................................................................. 17 Network-Based Structural Assurance ................................................................... 20 Network-Based Status (Prestige) .......................................................................... 22 Network-Based Similarity (Homophily)............................................................... 26 2.4. The Research Model .................................................................................................. 28 2.5. Research Methodology .............................................................................................. 30 2.5.1. Construct Operationalization ...................................................................... 30 2.5.2. Dataset and Data Analysis .......................................................................... 36 2.6. Results and Findings .................................................................................................. 39 2.6.1. Measurement Model Validation ................................................................. 39 2.6.2. Structural Model Analysis (Hypothesis Testing Results) ........................... 43 2.7. Discussion .................................................................................................................. 47 CHAPTER 3 ................................................................................................................................. 52 Essay 2: Trust Prediction in Online Social Networks ................................................................... 52 3.1. Introduction ................................................................................................................ 52 3.2. Related Work ............................................................................................................. 56 3.2.1. Link Prediction............................................................................................ 56 3.2.2. Sign Prediction ............................................................................................ 59 3.3. Research Questions .................................................................................................... 66 v 3.4. Proposed Predictive Model ........................................................................................ 68 3.4.1. Trust/Distrust link Predictors ...................................................................... 69 3.4.2 Model ........................................................................................................... 77 3.5. Experiment ................................................................................................................. 82 3.5.1. Dataset......................................................................................................... 82 3.5.2. Experiment Design and Evaluation ............................................................ 82 3.6. Results ........................................................................................................................ 87 3.7. Discussion .................................................................................................................. 91 CHAPTER 4 ................................................................................................................................. 94 Essay 3: Lexicon-Based Trust Mining in Online Social Networks .............................................. 94 4.1. Introduction ................................................................................................................ 94 4.2. Related Work ............................................................................................................. 97 4.2.1. Trustworthiness in Online Communities .................................................... 99 4.2.2. Feature-Based Opinion Mining................................................................. 101 Topic Modeling ....................................................................................... 104 Supervised Learning Approach............................................................... 105 Unsupervised (Lexicon-Based) Approach .............................................. 106 4.3. Proposed
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