Publications

You Have Earned a Trophy: Characterize In-Game Achievements and Their Completions

game analytics HCI user engagement

Achievement systems have been actively adopted in gaming platforms to maintain players’ interests. Among them, trophies in PlayStation games are one of the most successful achievement systems. While the importance of trophy design has been casually discussed in many game developers’ forums, there has been no systematic study of the historical dataset of trophies yet. In this work, we construct a complete dataset of PlayStation games and their trophies and investigate them from both the developers’ and players’ perspectives.

Haewoon Kwak

ACM WebSci, 2022

Measuring 9 Emotions of News Posts from 8 News Organizations across 4 Social Media Platforms for 8 Months

computational journalism social media user engagement

Using Plutchik’s wheel of emotions framework, we identify the emotional content of 133,487 social media posts and the audience’s emotional engagement expressed in 2,824,162 comments on those posts. We measure nine emotions (anger, anticipation, anxiety, disgust, joy, fear, sadness, surprise, trust) and two sentiments (positive and negative) using two extraction resources (EmoLex, LIWC) for eight major news outlets across four social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube) during eight months. We then apply two approaches (Logistic Regression, Long Short-Term Memory) to predict emotional audience reactions before and after publishing the posts. …

Kholoud Khalil Aldous, Jisun An, Bernard J. Jansen

ACM Transactions on Social Computing, 2022

10+ papers citing this work (Google scholar)

What really matters?: characterising and predicting user engagement of news postings using multiple platforms, sentiments and topics

computational journalism social media user engagement

This research characterises user engagement of approximately 3,000,000 news postings of 53 news outlets and 50,000,000 associated user comments during 8 months on 5 social media platforms (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit). We investigate the effect of sentiments and topics on user engagement across four levels of user engagement expressions (i.e. views, likes, comments, cross-platform posting). We find that sentiments and topics differ by both news outlets and social media platforms, and both sentiments and topics by the four levels of user engagement expression. …

Kholoud Khalil Aldous, Jisun An, Bernard J. Jansen

Behaviour & Information Technology, 2022

10+ papers citing this work (Google scholar)

Precision Public Health Campaign: Delivering Persuasive Messages to Relevant Segments Through Targeted Advertisements on Social Media

social media user engagement

We propose a novel precision public health campaign framework to structure and standardize the process of designing and delivering tailored health messages to target particular population segments using social media–targeted advertising tools. Our framework consists of five stages - defining a campaign goal, priority audience, and evaluation metrics; splitting the target audience into smaller segments; tailoring the message for each segment and conducting a pilot test; running the health campaign formally; and evaluating the performance of the campaigns. We have demonstrated how the framework works through 2 case studies. The precision public health campaign framework has the potential to support higher population uptake and engagement rates by encouraging a more standardized, concise, efficient, and targeted approach to public health campaign development.

Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Hanya M Qureshi, Ingmar Weber

JMIR Form Res 2021;5(9):e22313, 2021

10+ papers citing this work (Google scholar)

How-to Present News on Social Media: A Causal Analysis of Editing News Headlines for Boosting User Engagement

computational journalism AI/ML/NLP social media user engagement

We first build a parallel corpus of original news articles and their corresponding tweets that were shared by eight media outlets. Then, we explore how those media edited tweets against original headlines, and the effects would be..

Kunwoo Park, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Sanjay Chawla

Proceedings of the 15th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2021

5+ papers citing this work (Google scholar)

“Trust Me, I Have a Ph.D.”: A Propensity Score Analysis on the Halo Effect of Disclosing One's Offline Social Status in Online Communities

computational social science AI/ML/NLP social media user engagement

We study two Reddit communities that adopted this scheme, whereby posts include tags identifying education status referred to as flairs, and we examine how the “transferred” social status affects the interactions among the users.

Kunwoo Park, Haewoon Kwak, Hyunho Song, Meeyoung Cha

Proceedings of the 14th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2020

5+ papers citing this work (Google scholar)

View, Like, Comment, Post: Analyzing User Engagement by Topic at 4 Levels across 5 Social Media Platforms for 53 News Organizations

computational journalism social media user engagement

We evaluate the effects of the topics of social media posts on audiences across five social media platforms (i.e., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit) at four levels of user engagement. We collected 3,163,373 social posts from 53 news organizations across five platforms during an 8month period.

Kholoud Khalil Aldous, Jisun An, Bernard J. Jansen

Proceedings of the 13th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2019

85+ papers citing this work (Google scholar)

Multidimensional Analysis of the News Consumption of Different Demographic Groups on a Nationwide Scale

computational journalism user engagement

Examining 103,133 news articles that are the most popular for different demographic groups in Daum News (the second most popular news portal in South Korea) during the whole year of 2015, we provided multi-level analyses of gender and age differences in news consumption. We measured such differences in four different levels - (1) by actual news items, (2) by section, (3) by topic, and (4) by subtopic. We characterized the news items at the four levels by using the computational techniques, which are topic modeling and the vector representation of words and news items. We found that differences in news reading behavior across different demographic groups are the most noticeable in subtopic level but neither section nor topic levels.

Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak

Proceedings of Social Informatics (SocInfo), 2017

Demographics of News Sharing in the US Twittersphere

computational journalism social media user engagement

The widespread adoption and dissemination of online news through social media systems have been revolutionizing many segments of our society and ultimately our daily lives. In these systems, users can play a central role as they share content to their friends. Despite that, little is known about news spreaders in social media. In this paper, we provide the first of its kind in-depth characterization of news spreaders in social media. In particular, we investigate their demographics, what kind of content they share, and the audience they reach.

Julio Reis, Haewoon Kwak, and Jisun An, Johnnatan Messias, Fabrıcio Benevenuto

Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT), 2017

35+ papers citing this work (Google scholar)

Achievement and Friends: Key Factors of Player Retention Vary Across Player Levels in Online Multiplayer Games

game analytics user engagement

Retaining players over an extended period of time is a long-standing challenge in game industry. Significant effort has been paid to understanding what motivates players enjoy games. While individuals may have varying reasons to play or abandon a game at different stages within the game, previous studies have looked at the retention problem from a snapshot view. This study, by analyzing in-game logs of 51,104 distinct individuals in an online multiplayer game, uniquely offers a multifaceted view of the retention problem over the players’ virtual life phases.

Kunwoo Park, Meeyoung Cha, Haewoon Kwak, Kuan-Ta Chen

Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW) Companion, 2017

35+ papers citing this work (Google scholar)