Influence Assessment in Twitter Multi-Relational Network

Abstract : Influence in Twitter has become recently a hot research topic since this micro-blogging service is widely used to share and disseminate information. Some users are more able than others to influence and persuade peers. Thus, studying most influential users leads to reach a large-scale information diffusion area, something very useful in marketing or political campaigns. In this paper, we propose a new approach for influence assessment on Twitter network, it is based on a modified version of the conjunctive combination rule in belief functions theory in order to combine different influence markers such as retweets, mentions and replies. We experiment the proposed method on a large amount of data gathered from Twitter in the context of the European Elections 2014 and deduce top influential candidates.