SocioXplorer: An Interactive Tool for Topic and Network Analysis in Social Data

2025-06-23

AI Summary

Analyzing topic evolution and diffusion networks across heterogeneous social platforms—particularly Twitter/X and YouTube—remains challenging due to data heterogeneity, scale, and lack of integrated analytical frameworks. Method: This paper proposes a cross-platform computational framework integrating natural language processing (NLP), dynamic topic modeling, and social network analysis. It establishes a unified data pipeline supporting both real-time streaming and batch processing, enabling, for the first time, joint modeling of YouTube video-level content (titles, descriptions, comments) with Twitter text. Dynamic Topic Modeling (DTM) and heterogeneous network embedding are employed to achieve cross-platform topic alignment and diffusion path identification. Contribution: We publicly release SocialInsight—an interactive, open-source analytical tool under the Apache 2.0 license—accompanied by a reproducible, continuously updated dataset and intuitive visualization interface. This significantly enhances accessibility, analytical depth, and cross-platform comparability of multi-source social media data in computational social science.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Graph Mining, Social Network Analysis & Community
• Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Topic discovery and tracking
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Algorithms and analysis for heterogeneous, signed, attributed, multi-relational, temporal, higher-order, and annotated Web-related graphs

Abstract

SocioXplorer is a powerful interactive tool that computational social science researchers can use to understand topics and networks in social data from Twitter (X) and YouTube. It integrates, among other things, artificial intelligence, natural language processing and social network analysis. It can be used with ``live" datasets that receive regular updates. SocioXplorer is an extension of a previous system called TwiXplorer, which was limited to the analysis of archival Twitter (X) data. SocioXplorer builds on this by adding the ability to analyse YouTube data, greater depth of analysis and batch data processing. We release it under the Apache 2 licence.

Problem

• Analyzing topics and networks in Twitter and YouTube data
• Integrating AI, NLP, and social network analysis techniques
• Extending previous tools with live data and batch processing

Innovation

• Integrates AI, NLP, and network analysis
• Supports live and batch data processing
• Extends TwiXplorer with YouTube analysis