Semantic aggregation and zooming of user viewpoints in social media content

Social web provides rich content for gaining an understanding about the users which can empower adaptation. There is a current trend to extract user profiles from social media content using semantic augmentation and linking to domain ontologies. The paper shows a further step in this research strand, exploiting semantics to get a deeper understanding about the users by extracting the domain regions where the users focus, which are defined as viewpoints. The paper outlines a formal framework for extracting viewpoints from semantic tags associated with user comments. This enables zooming into the viewpoints at different aggregation layers, as well as comparing users on the basis of the areas where they focus. The framework is applied on YouTube content, illustrating an insight into emotions users refer to in their comments on job interview videos.