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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Information & Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/im

User opinion classication in social media: A global consistency

maximization approach
Jiexun Lia,* , Xin Lib , Bin Zhuc
a
College of Business & Economics, Department of Decision Sciences, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA 98225, USA
b
Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
c
College of Business, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Article history:
Received 17 July 2015 Social media is a major platform for opinion sharing. In order to better understand and exploit opinions
Received in revised form 10 May 2016 on social media, we aim to classify users with opposite opinions on a topic for decision support. Rather
Accepted 5 June 2016 than mining text content, we introduce a link-based classication model, named global consistency
Available online xxx maximization (GCM) that partitions a social network into two classes of users with opposite opinions.
Experiments on a Twitter data set show that: (1) our global approach achieves higher accuracy than two
Keywords: baseline approaches and (2) link-based classiers are more robust to small training samples if selected
Big data properly.
Social media
2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Opinion mining
Collective classication

1. Introduction with hundreds of millions of active users and postings generated

In electronic commerce, a major challenge faced by companies
is to understand their customers opinions to design and conduct
marketing campaigns. The emergence of big-data platforms and
technologies makes it possible for e-commerce companies to
access and analyze data about a large population of (potential)
customers. In particular, social media is a major source and
battleeld of e-commerce big-data analytics, due to its growing
popularity for information distribution and opinion sharing.
Mining data in social media to gain marketing intelligence have
been identied as one of the major applications of big-data
analytics [1]. The analysis of social media data not only enables
businesses to have more effective conversations with their
customers [2] but also facilitates the understanding of peoples
opinions about their products/services [3]. Zhao et al. [8] identied
social media analytics as a critical complement to traditional
survey analytics to increase the validity of market studies. Online
opinions have been used in a variety of analytic solutions, such as
sales prediction [4,5], search engine design [6], and nancial
market forecasting [7].
Mining social media data requires big-data solutions. For
instance, microblogging sites like Twitter are growing at a high rate
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: jiexun@gmail.com (J. Li), xin.li.phd@gmail.com (X. Li),
bin.zhu@oregonstate.edu (B. Zhu).
per day. In order to mine data of such large volume and high
velocity, businesses must be equipped with advanced analytical
technology to obtain an accurate overview of social opinion
landscape for better decision support. Furthermore, social media
contains a mixture of various types of data, such as textual content,
multimedia content, and social interactions. Analytical solutions
for social media must be capable of modeling such data variety.
Hence, among the main research directions in business intelli-
gence and analytics [9], mining opinions from noisy unstructured
text in streams and mining link structures in social networks pose
signicant challenges and opportunities for the big-data analytics
research community.
In order to successfully make use of opinions in social media for
decision making, it is important to classify individuals viewpoints
into two sides of a debate. Many business questions can be
formulated as a binary decision, such as Should our product have a
larger screen size? or Do we need a luxury version of our current
product/service? It is crucial for companies to accurately estimate
the for and against populations in social media platforms and
identify target groups for marketing campaigns. Because it is
difcult to fully understand the demographics or opinions of all
users before starting a campaign, it is a common practice to begin
with a select group of seed users.
Most traditional methods of opinion mining try to classify
users opinions analyzing text content of the postings [10]. In
social media such as Twitter, the performance of such
approaches is often unsatisfactory due to the short length of

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2016.06.004
0378-7206/ 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article in press as: J. Li, et al., User opinion classication in social media: A global consistency maximization approach, Inf.
Manage. (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2016.06.004
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online postings and informal writing styles. Furthermore, with a
limited number of seed users as training data, content-based
opinion classiers often fail to achieve high classication
accuracy.
Enlightened by the variety nature of big data, our study takes a
different perspective to address the opinion classication problem.
As we know, the network structure of users interacting with each
other in social media contains rich information suggesting opinion
groups. How opinions are formed, divided, and spread is often
guided by the principles of homophily and social inuence. In
microblogging, as participants receive messages only from those
who they choose to follow, it is highly unlikely that they will follow
a person whom they do not like or care about. Hence, the following
relationships among users may suggest a layer of homophily that
can be exploited to identify opinion camps. Another valuable
information source for opinion mining is the retweeting relation-
ships among users. According to studies investigating the
motivation behind online activities, microblog participants usually
retweet a message because they think it could help others make
decisions [11]. They may also retweet messages to stay connected
with others who receive the message or show support to the
sender of the message [12]. As a result, in the context of
microblogging, people are less likely to retweet a message if they
disagree with the content of the message or dislike the sender of
the message.
On the basis of social inuence theories, link structures among
users could also suggest users opinion. Most existing studies take a
local view and classify each users opinions separately. In such
approaches, early errors may propagate to later classications and
thus lead to lower accuracy. We propose a novel method that takes
advantage of the global structure of social interactions to alleviate
the opinion classication problem in a collective manner. In
particular, we model the individuals involved in a topic discussion
as a graph according to their communication linkages. Our
conjecture is that this graph reects stabilized social relations
where people with common opinions tend to interact more and
people with opposite opinions tend to communicate less. On the
basis of this conjecture, we propose a global consistency
optimization algorithm to collectively classify the opinions of
users involved in debates in social media. Our research shows that
our proposed opinion classier is not only accurate but also robust
to the size of seed users as long as the seeds are chosen
appropriately.
We consider our study a novel and signicant contribution to
the design of analytical solutions in electronic commerce. Our
work focuses on analyzing the large volume of everchanging
opinion data generated by users in social media. In particular, our
proposed approach takes advantage of the variety of social media
data by leveraging the link relationships among users to achieve
highly accurate classication of opinions. Furthermore, the global
maximization algorithm shows signicant robustness to the size of
training set. This strength of our approach can help mitigate a
common problem in big-data analytics, that is, the limited amount
of labeled data. Our research has signicant implications for both
researchers and practitioners of big-data analytics in electronic
commerce.
2. Literature review
Opinion mining is an important problem in text mining [10],
which has been examining the subjectivity and polarity of text. In
the context of this research, we are more interested in the
classication of opinion polarity, that is, positive or negative. In
existing literature, related work on opinion classication can be
divided into content-based and link-based approaches.
Please cite this article in press as: J. Li, et al., User opinion classication in social media: A global consistency maximization approach, Inf.
Manage. (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2016.06.004
2.1. Content-based approaches
Opinion classication is often based on textual contents, which
can take two approaches: lexicon-based and learning-based
methods. Lexicon-based approaches use lexicons and predened
rules to annotate sentiments of text [13]. For example, Demers and
Vega [14] used a lexicon approach to measure the tone of news.
Learning-based methods use machine-learning techniques upon
linguistic features, including the lexicon features if available, to
build opinion classication models. For example, Yang et al. [15]
applied association rules and a Nave Bayes (NB) classier to
classify the sentiments of online consumer reviews on
e-commerce websites.
With the rise of social media, opinion mining is widely applied
to social media applications such as Twitter and Facebook. Most
existing studies used the textual contents to resolve this problem.
Mostafa [16] used a lexicon-based approach to classify brand
sentiments. Li and Xu [17] constructed a rule-based system to
detect the events in microblog posts that cause emotional effects.
In the machine-learning approach camp, Sayeedunnissa et al. [18]
took a classic NB approach with the bag-of-words model and
information gain-based feature selection to classify Twitter
sentiments. Akaichi et al. [19] and Hamouda and Akaichi [20]
used support vector machine (SVM) and NB approach to classify
Facebook status sentiments. Myslin et al. [21] compared multiple
classic machine-learning approaches to classify Twitter
sentiments on tobacco products. It is worth noting that Hassan
et al. [22] proposed a bootstrapping ensemble approach to address
the Twitter sentiment classication problem. The approach
provided more accurate and balanced predictions and built
sentiment time series that better reect events eliciting strong
sentiments from users. There were also studies combining
machine-learning with lexicon-based approaches to classify
sentiments [23,24]. In the machine-learning approach, clustering
methods were also used to analyze social media opinions. For
example, Paltoglou and Thelwall [25] proposed an unsupervised
lexicon-based approach that estimates the level of emotional
intensity contained in text. Feng et al. [26] used PLSA to cluster
blogs with sentiments as a latent variable, which was able to nd
sentiment coherent groups.
2.2. Link-based approaches
Social media provides a new platform for users to communicate
and interact with each other. When a user posts a message online
to express his/her opinion, it can incur a series of responses such as
compliments, praises, disagreements, and even attacks from other
users. Each of these responses can lead to even more responses in a
spreading manner. Such response relationships form a social
network of opinionated users. The linkage (i.e., relationship)
information has become new evidence that can help distinguish
users opinions. Because users are connected to each other in a
social network and their class labels are intercorrelated, opinion
mining has become a collective classication problem [27].
Many studies have tried to use the linkage information
embedded in social networks for classifying users opinions in
social media. However, they view the semantics of linkages in
social networks differently. In an early effort of link-based opinion
classication, Agrawal et al. [28] analyzed a social network formed
by respond-to relationships in newsgroups. By assuming that a
respond-to relationship represents disagreement, they use a
max-cut graph-partitioning algorithm to break highly weighted
disagreeing edges and separate users into two groups. Their
assumption of respond-to indicating disagreement may not hold
in other popular social media platforms. On Twitter, following or
retweeting someone is more likely to mean that the users agree
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with each other or share a similar opinion. Therefore, more studies
on link-based opinion mining are based on the homophily
assumption [29], that is, the phenomenon of birds of a feather
ock together [30]. Users who are connected by a mutual
relationship are more likely to share common opinions. In the
context of opinion classication on a social media platform like
Twitter, researchers have investigated users mutual relationships
in a variety of forms, including follow [3134] mention [32,35],
or retweet [3537]. In particular, using @ mentions, as a way of
creating connections on Twitter, may also indicate a desire to pay
attention (e.g., to information of interest). Among the homophily
connections, several studies suggested that the follow links had
little positive impact on classication accuracy [31]. Conover et al.
[35] found that combining attention links with follow links is
superior to using follow links alone. Wong et al. [36] also argue that
following (a tweeter) is not a robust indicator of approval or
agreement on political opinions. A user may follow two sources on
Twitter with opposite political stances to obtain a more unbiased
comprehensive view. A follow link may exist as a stale edge in the
Twitter following network, simply because a user forgets to
unfollow a prominent tweeter whom he/she is no long interested
in. By contrast, retweeting is often an explicit act of approval and
therefore a stronger evidence for agreement in opinions.
On the basis of the homophily assumption, a variety of
analytical techniques have been developed for opinion classica-
tion. One of the most popular techniques used in several studies is
label propagation (LP), which analyzes the labels in a nodes
neighborhood and tries to assign a label to each node in an iterative
manner. Ren et al. [38] used this method for determining class
labels of customer reviews based on a graph consisting of links
representing similarity between nodes. In order to predict the
political alignment of Twitter users, Conover et al. [35] studied two
types of communication networks, based on mention edges and
retweet edges, and proposed a solution of community detection
using an LP algorithm [39]. Speriosu et al. [31] developed an
opinion polarization approach by combining both lexical links (e.g.,
text, hash tags, and emotions) and following links in a graph. A
semi-supervised LP algorithm was used for classication with
different seeding methods. In addition, for tweet-level opinion
classication, Rajadesingan and Liu [37] made an assumption that
two tweets being retweeted by the same users within a short time
period are likely similar in terms of opinion. They introduced a
graph-based algorithm, namely ReLP (retweet label propagation)
that starts with a set of seeds and iteratively propagates labels to
similar tweets. Tan et al. [32] proposed an opinion polarization
approach by incorporating social network information such as
follow and mention linkages. Their graph-based classication
models consist of loopy belief propagation to infer user-level
sentiment labels. Rabelo et al. [33,34] applied a relational classier
combined with a relaxation labeling algorithm on a Twitter
follower network to collectively predict political polarity of users.
All the aforementioned studies showed that classication models
based on links in a graph outperformed traditional content-based
opinion classiers.
Most of these existing collective opinion classiers, such as LP
[35] or relaxation labeling [33,34], take a local view and label each
node based on the labels of its direct neighbors. Such a labeling
process iterates in the graph until the solution converges, which
may be highly computationally expensive. More importantly,
propagating labels based on dependencies in local neighborhoods
may not necessarily lead to a global optimal solution.
In optimization theory and graph theory, minimum cut
(min-cut) is a combinatorial optimization problem that partitions
the vertices of a graph into two disjointed subsets such that the
total capacity of the removed edges is minimum [40]. The min-cut
method and its dual, max-ow, have been widely used in a number
Please cite this article in press as: J. Li, et al., User opinion classication in social media: A global consistency maximization approach, Inf.
Manage. (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2016.06.004
3
of real-world applications such as project scheduling [41], gene
function prediction [42], and image segmentation [43]. Unlike LP,
the min-cut method takes a global view and nds an optimal
partition of the entire graph to reach maximum consistency in the
two subgraphs. To the best of our knowledge, no prior study has
used the min-cut approach to classify users opinions on Twitter.
2.3. Research questions
Among the state-of-the-art techniques for opinion classica-
tion, content-based approaches (e.g., NB classiers) [1820] ignore
the rich information of social linkages among users, while
link-based approaches (e.g., LP) [31,35,39] exploit linkage infor-
mation but take a local view. Our study, based on the homophily
assumption and taking a global view, is aimed at modeling users
opinions collectively in the entire structure of the network. In this
study, we investigate whether such a global optimization approach
can outperform the state-of-the-art opinion classiers in terms of
accuracy.
Furthermore, traditional content-based opinion classication
methods generally require a training data set with a reasonably
large number of labeled instances. Data annotation is known to be
a tedious task that requires a large amount of time, effort, and
domain expertise. Given the enormous volume of data on social
media platforms, how many data instances (e.g., tweets) do we
need to review and label for training to guarantee the potential
capability of the classier? We are interested in determining the
robustness of opinion classiers to the training set size and the
method of choosing the most important data instances for training
opinion classiers. In particular, this study is aimed at addressing
the following research questions:
Q1. Can a collective classier based on global optimization
outperform existing models for opinion classication?
Q2. How robust are opinion classiers to different sizes of training
data sets?
Q3. What is the best strategy to choose seed users as training data
for opinion classication?
3. Model
Debates in social media are often a dynamic process involving
heated discussion between two sides. The involved users, however,
may only interact with a portion of users to express their opinion.
In circumstances where one feels that his/her opinion is fully
expressed, he/she may not generate much content. In such
circumstances, predicting each users opinion by analyzing his/
her postings and relationships separately, as in most existing work,
may not be the best solution. Rather, we introduce a novel
approach that takes into account the interdependencies between
users and classies user opinions in a collective manner. Our
approach builds an undirected graph to represent users involved in
an online debate. On the basis of the homophily assumption, we
model opinion classication as a global consistency maximization
(GCM) problem [42]. Our collective opinion classier can nd an
optimal solution by partitioning the graph into two components,
each representing one side of the debate.
3.1. Problem formulation
We represent a social network as an undirected graph: G(V, E).
In such a graph, V:{v1, v2, . . . , vn} is a set of n vertices/nodes, in
which each node represents an online user. E:{eij} is a set of
edges/links, in which each link eij represents a certain relationship
(s) between two users i and j. The users discuss certain topics. For a
specic topic, a user i may hold an opinion state xi. We assume only
two possible opinion states in this study and set xi = 1 if user i is a
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supporter (for) and xi =
1 if user i is an opponent (against) of a
certain topic.
In practice, it is often easier to identify some highly visible
opinion leaders. This group consists of the most vocal and
opinionated users such as activists, politicians, and celebrities.
We can manually assign the opinion labels (either 1 or
1) to such
users as seeds (or training data), denoted by Vv. For the
remaining (majority) users in the network, the opinions are
unknown (xi = 0). Our goal is to assign a state value xi to each user i
with xi = 0 by analyzing the linkage between users in the social
network.
3.2. Global consistency maximization
On Twitter, two nodes i and j can have different relationships/
interactions, for example:
 Following: user i follows user j, which indicates that i is
interested in j.
 Retweeting: user i retweets messages by user j, which often
indicates that i is distributing js opinion, possibly adding his/her
own opinion on the topic.
 Commenting/replying: user i comments on messages posted by
user j, which indicates that i is expressing an opinion to either
agree or disagree with j.
 Liking/favoriting: user i likes messages by user j, which often
indicates that i agrees with j.
Each of these relationships between i and j can be regarded as
evidence of (dis)agreement between the two users. All the
evidence can be aggregated to an agreement score wij (associated
with each edge eij) of their opinions on the topic. It is important to
note that wij can be either positive (agreement) or negative
(disagreement). In this study, we focus only on retweeting
relationships. Retweeting is often considered an explicit act of
approval and a more robust indicator of agreement than other
relationships such as following [36]. Like most related work
[3537], our approach is based on the homophily assumption, that
is, when a user i retweets another user j, they tend to share the
same opinion on this topic. Therefore, the agreement score wij
between the two users is proportional to the number of retweets
between them (either i retweeting j or j retweeting i).
For each pair of users i and j with opinion states xi and xj, we
dene wij xi xj as a consistency score of the edge connecting i and j.
As wij > 0 indicates they are likely to agree each other, we generally
want to set xi and xj to be the same (either 1 or
1). Accordingly, if
wij < 0, we generally expect the two disagree, and xi and xj have
opposite values. Thus, at the social network level, we argue that the
optimal opinion state assignment should provide us the highest
overall consistency across the network:
XX
MaximizeE wij xi xj
i j
s:t:xi ; xj f1;
1; 0g
In order to solve this optimization problem, we construct a new
directed graph H from the undirected graph G (which has users
with unknown opinion states). Each node of H corresponds to a
node of G. H also contains two new nodes: a source node s (for)
and sink node t (against). Unlike edges in G, each edge in H is
directed. Fig. 1 illustrates how to transform an undirected graph G
(Fig. 1(a)) into a directed graph H (Fig. 1(b)) by creating six different
types of edges based on the following rules:
 For each node i in G with xi = 1, we create a direct edge from node
s to node i with wsi = 1.
Please cite this article in press as: J. Li, et al., User opinion classication in social media: A global consistency maximization approach, Inf.
Manage. (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2016.06.004
0
1
0 -1
1
0
(a) Undirected graph G
0
1
s 0 -1 t
source 1 sink
0
(b) Directed graph H
for against to be determined
Fig. 1. Transforming an Undirected Graph G into Directed Graph H.
 For each node i in G with xi =
1, we create a direct edge from
node i to node t with wit = 1.
 For each edge in G connecting node i and node j such that xi = 1
and xj = 0, we create a direct edge from node i to node j with edge
weight wij copied from G.
 For each edge in G connecting node i and node j such that xi = 0
and xj =
1, we create a direct edge from node i to node j with
edge weight wij copied from G.
 For each edge in G connecting node i and node j such that xi = 0
and xj = 0, we create a direct edge from node i to node j and a
direct edge from j to i, with wij = wji copied from G.
 The edges in G that are not incident on a node in state 0 are
ignored.
With this new directed graph H, classifying opinions of users
is converted to a min-cut problem. An st cut in graph H is a
partition of the nodes of H into two sets S and T, where S
contains the source node s and T contains node t. An edge (u, v)
crosses the cut if u lies in S and v lies in T. The weight of the cut
is the sum of the weights of the edges crossing the cut. Because
a high weight represents a high degree of agreement between
two users, separating two highly agreeing nodes on two sides is
considered a reduction in consistency. Therefore, our objective is
to nd the st cut C with the smallest weight in H. For each node
i in S, we set xi = 1; for each node i in T, we set xi =
1. Because
we have set the weights of edges incident on s and t (edges of
types 1 and 2) to be innity, they will not be selected to
participate in C. Hence, the only edges in C are those incident on
nodes with state equal to 0. Each edge in C of types 3 or 4
corresponds to one inconsistent edge in G, an edge between two
users who retweeted one another but have opposite opinions. In
each pair of edges of type 5, at most one edge can belong to C;
according to the denition of the st cut, the edge in the pair
directed from a node in T to a node in S does not belong to the
cut. Therefore, each edge in C corresponds to exactly one
inconsistent edge in G in a one-to-one manner. Hence, the cut C
with the smallest weight gives the optimal state assignment that
minimizes the total weight of inconsistent edges in G.
In the example in Fig. 1, suppose the weights of all edges not
incident on s or t are 1 and the min-cut in H is the edge connecting
the node in state 0 to the one in state
1. Thus, the algorithm
should assign a state of 1 to both nodes in state 0.
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J. Li et al. / Information & Management xxx (2016) xxxxxx 5

4. Experimental evaluation  Content-based classier

4.1. Data set A content-based classier (CC) differentiates two sides of a

debate, supporters, and opponents, solely based on the content of
In order to compare and evaluate different opinion classica- their postings. During a Twitter debate, each user vi may express
tion methods, we use a real-world Twitter data set from Ref. [37]. his/her opinion via multiple tweets or retweets {tij}. We use a basic
This data set spans a period of 5 days during the heated debate on bag-of-words method to represent each posting as a feature
gun reform from 15 April 201318 April 2013. This data set was vector of word occurrences. For each visibly opinionated user, who
collected using Twitters streaming API with keywords such as always takes one side of two opinions, we can label all his/her
gun and gun control. The data set consists of 916,171 postings postings as 1 (for) if he/she is a supporter or
1 (against) if an
(505,637 original tweets and 410,534 retweets) by 491,860 users. opponent. Such a collection of postings is used as the training set
Among the users; there are visibly opinionated users; who are used for CC. In previous opinion-mining research, NB classiers are
as seeds for model training; and moderately opinionated users; found among the top-performing CC [1820]. Hence, in our
who are used for performance evaluation. experiments, we also choose NB to build an opinion classication
model as a baseline. In our experiments, we choose the commonly
 Visibly opinionated users: On Twitter, lists are created and used algorithm, NB classier, to build an opinion classication
maintained by users as a form of groups. For example, lists such model. Then, for a user vi, whose opinion is to be determined, we
as Protect 2nd Amendment or Guns Save Lives are clearly use the trained NB classier to predict the opinion of each of his/
against gun reform; other lists such as Prevent Gun Violence her postings. For each posting tij by vi, the NB classier gives a
and Gun Safety are apparently supporters for gun reform. In probability score pij+ of the posting tij being positive and pij
of it
this data set, 262 users (84 for and 178 against gun reform) were being negative. Then, all predicted probability scores of his/her
identied as visibly opinionated users from such related lists. postings are aggregated by class to determine user vis class label xi
This subset of users (Vv) is used as a training set in our as follows:
experiments. 8 X X
 Moderately opinionated users: This group contains users who >
> 1 if p > p

>
> ij ij
< Xj Xj
posted between 2 and 4 tweets during the collection cycle, do not xi
1 if
> pij < p

ij
belong to any relevant list, and do not label themselves as for/ >
>
>
: j j
against gun reform in their Twitter prole page. From a randomly 0 otherwise
selected sample of 500 users in this group, each was manually
annotated as for or against based on their tweets. Out of the 500 If the sum of positive scores is higher than the sum of negative
users, 276 are for gun reform, 120 are against, and the rest shared scores, this user is labeled 1; if the sum of positive scores is less
information tweets (such as gun reform-related news) but did than the sum of negative scores, this user is labeled
1; otherwise,
not voice their personal opinions and were hence ignored. This the users opinion is undetermined and labeled 0.
subset of 396 users is considered as the test set in our
experiments.  Label propagation

Given this data set, we build a graph G that represents the social
network of all users. In this graph G, each vertex represents a user
and each edge represents a relationship between two users. This
study only considers the retweet relationship between users. Thus,
an edge eij between vertices i and j indicates user i retweeted j and/
or j retweeted i. The weight of eij, wij, is dened as the number of
retweets between i and j. It is worth noting that 215,669 out of the
491,860 users are isolated vertices in the graph, because they did
not retweet or were not retweeted by others. Table 1 provides an
overall description of this Twitter data set.
4.2. Baseline methods and implementation
For comparison, we develop two baseline methods for
classifying users of opposing opinions.
Among the link-based opinion classiers, LP is one of the most
popular and effective techniques in several studies [31,35,39]. In
our experiments, we implement an LP algorithm for opinion
classication as a second baseline. Like GCM, LP is based on the
same homophily assumption, that is, a user tends to share the same
opinion as his/her neighbors. Fig. 2 shows the pseudo-code for the
LP algorithm. The algorithm starts with graph G, including a subset
of seeds Vv, that is, visibly opinionated users, whose class labels are
known. In each iteration, the algorithm traverses all vertices in G in
a random sequence. Each vertex i is assigned the majority label of
its neighbors. In order to determine the majority label, we take into
account the weight wij of the edge between vertices i and j, which
can be calculated in the same manner as in GCM. In this study, we
only consider the number of retweets between two users. The
Input: G including labeled vertices Vv
Output: G with all vertices labeled

Table 1 Procedure:
Data description of the Twitter data set. 1. new TRUE
# users (vertices) 491,860 2. while (new)
# isolated users 215,669 3. new FALSE
# connected users 276,191 4. S random sequence ofall vertices in G
# visibly opinionated users 262 (84 for; 178 against) 5. for each vertex i in S:
# moderately opinionated users 396 (276 for; 120 against) 6. l the majority label of is neighbors
# of postings 916,171 7. ifis label xi != l
# of original tweets 505,637 8. xi l
# of retweets 410,534 9. new TRUE
# edges 384,331
Fig. 2. Pseudo-code of a Label Propagation Algorithm.

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Manage. (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2016.06.004
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propagation process stops when there is no further change on the
vertices labels.
Our experiments are conducted on a laptop computer with the
following conguration: Intel Core i5-4310U CPU @ 2.00 GHz
2.60 GHz, 8 GB RAM, 64-bit Operating system, Windows 8.1
Enterprise. All three opinion classication models are
implemented in Python. For both link-based classiers, LP and
GCM, we use a well-known Python package for network analysis
called NetworkX (Version 1.8.1) (https://networkx.github.io/) to
build the undirected graph G and the directed graph H for GCM. A
function named minimum_edge_cut() in NetworkX is used to
compute the min-cut for GCM. In our evaluation, CC trains the
classier using the tweets by the 262 visibly opinionated users and
predicts the labels of the 396 moderately opinionated users, with
no need to classify all other users in the large network of
approximately 500,000 users. The computing time (including
training and testing) for CC was 105 s. By contrast, both LP and GCM
require computing over the entire network(s) of connected nodes,
not just those 396 in the test set, and hence consume more time. In
particular, in our experiments, the computing time for LP was
5013 s and that for GCM was 6351 s. It is worth noting that,
although seemingly more time-consuming, LP and GCM complete
classifying all 276,191 connected users in the network, while CC
classies only 396 for evaluation. Nevertheless, the efciency of
the link-based classiers is not yet satisfactory and we encourage
further research for improvement.
4.3. Evaluation metrics
Our experiments compare the performance of three opinion
classiers: CC, LP, and GCM. This task is a binary classication of
users into two categories of opinions: for versus against. We use
standard measures, that is, accuracy, precision, recall, and
F-measure. Accuracy assesses the overall correctness of classica-
tion. Precision, recall, and F-measure evaluate the accuracy of each
class. These four metrics are dened as follows:
of correctly classified instances
accuracy
of all classified instances
of instances correctly classified in classi
precisioni
of instances classified in classi
of instances correctly classified in classi
recalli
of instances in classi
2  precisioni  recalli
F
measurei
precisioni recalli
It is worth noting that, for the two link-based classiers LP and
GCM, if a user is an isolated vertex in the graph without any
retweeting edges with others, the classiers are unable to
determine its label. Hence, such vertices will be labeled as
undetermined. In our evaluation, such undetermined users are
also counted as errors.
5. Results
5.1. Classication performance
In order to answer our research question Q1, Tables 2 and 3
show the results of the three opinion classication models. The
two link-based classiers, LP and GCM, achieve higher classica-
tion accuracy than the CC by >20%. In particular, GCM achieves the
Please cite this article in press as: J. Li, et al., User opinion classication in social media: A global consistency maximization approach, Inf.
Manage. (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2016.06.004
Table 2
Classication matrices of three opinion classication methods.
Predicted Actual
For Against
CC For 184 17
Against 92 103
Undetermined 0 0
LP For 267 17
Against 8 102
Undetermined 1 1
GCM For 267 16
Against 8 103
Undetermined 1 1
highest overall accuracy of 93.43%. For both classes, GCM achieves
the highest precision, recall, and F-measure: 94.35%, 96.74%, and
95.53% for class for; 92.79%, 85.83%, and 89.18% for class
against, respectively. Of the 396 users in the test set, LP and
GCM provide almost identical classication results, except for
three users. In particular, of these three users, GCM incorrectly
classies one to the against category, while LP incorrectly
classies two, one to for and the other to against. By checking
the linkages of these three users, we nd that each of them has two
retweeting linkages to other users. When the two linked nodes
are assigned opposite labels, link-based classiers have difculty in
determining the correct label for this node, unless additional
information (e.g., content and weights on linkages) is available and
considered.
Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the link-based classiers
have a limitation to predict the label of a node: this node has to be
directly or indirectly connected with some labeled nodes in the
graph. In our experiments, because the test set contains two
moderately opinionated users who are isolated vertices in the
graph, neither LP nor GCM can determine their class label. This
limitation, however, is not a problem for CC, because it predicts the
class label of a user based on the content of his/her tweets. For the
215,669 isolated users of the 491,860 users in our data set,
predicting their class labels would require a CC, like CC that we
implemented in this study, which results in a classication
accuracy of 75.47%.
5.2. Training sample selection
Because both LP and GCM are link-based, they can infer the class
label of a user based on what is known of his/her associations. In
order to answer our research questions Q2 and Q3, we conducted
further experiments and investigated how the link-based methods
perform in response to different sizes of training samples.
In our Twitter data set of 491,860 users, 262 are identied as
visibly opinionated users (for: 84; against: 178). We then examine
the robustness of the three classiers by reducing the number of
visibly opinionated users in the training set. In the context of
Twitter, there are different ways of choosing users to create a
training set. We consider the following four ranking methods in
our experiments:
1. Rank by the number of tweets (# tweets): This indicates how
active a user is when disseminating information and promoting
his/her opinions.
2. Rank by the number of followers (# followers): This number is
directly available on Twitter to show the popularity of the user.
3. Rank by the number of times being retweeted (# retweeted):
Retweeting is a major mechanism on Twitter for disseminating
information and opinions. A highly retweeted user tends to be
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J. Li et al. / Information & Management xxx (2016) xxxxxx 7

Table 3
Prediction performance of the three opinion classication methods.

Methods Accuracy (%) For Against

Precision (%) Recall (%) F-measure (%) Precision (%) Recall (%) F-measure (%)
CC 72.47 91.54 66.67 77.15 52.82 85.83 65.40
LP 93.18 94.01 96.74 95.36 92.73 85.00 88.70
GCM 93.43 94.35 96.74 95.53 92.79 85.83 89.18

one with strong opinions and high inuence on a particular
topic.
4. Rank by the number of times being retweeted and retweeting
others (degree): In a directed graph, that shows the retweeting
network among users, this number is the degree (in-degree +
out-degree) centrality score of each node.
For each ranking method, we compare the performance of the
three opinion classiers (CC, LP, and GCM) by varying the
percentage of top-ranked users included in the training set. In
particular, when the percentage of top users is 100%, all visibly
opinionated users were included in the training set. Then, we
gradually decrease the percentage until only the topmost user
from each class is included. Figs. 35 show the average precision,
recall, and F-measure scores of robustness tests for the three
classiers.
As shown in Fig. 3, as the size of the training set decreases, the
performance of CC is initially stable in the beginning and starts
decreasing when the percentage reaches about 25%. The irregular
shapes of the curves near the left end (percentage < 10%) indicate
that the classiers fail due to insufcient training data and
therefore assign all or most instances in the test set to only one of
the two classes. Among the four ranking methods, the rank by #
tweets method seems to be more robust and can maintain
performance until the training set size is below approximately 10%.
This is because the selected users are the most active ones who
posted the most tweets, which provides sufcient data instances to
achieve the best performance possible for this classier.
Figs. 4 and 5 show the results for the two link-based methods,
LP and GCM. For all four ranking methods, with only minor
uctuations, LP shows consistently high performance for classi-
cation, even when only a very low percentage of data instances are
included in the training set. In particular, for rank by # retweeted
and rank by degree, even if only one positive and one negative
instance are available in the training set, due to the high
connectivity of the graph, LP can still successfully propagate the
correct class labels to nodes and achieve almost the same
performance. For rank by # tweets and rank by # followers,
LP also maintains good classication performance until the
training set is reduced below 1.5% (i.e., two instances for each
class) and 1% (one instance for each class), respectively.
GCM achieves slightly better results than LP when 100% of the
opinionated users are used as training data. However, the
robustness of GCM against the training data size varies for
different ranking methods used to select the seed users. In
particular, for rank by # tweets and rank by # followers, GCMs

Fig. 3. Robustness Test for CC (performance vs.% of training data used).

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Fig. 4. Robustness Test for LP (performance vs.% of training data used).
classication performance starts dropping drastically when the
training sets size is below 75%. It is highly likely that some key
nodes that are critical to graph partition in GCM classiers were
excluded in the training set due to low number of tweets and/or
followers. Therefore, GCM fails to work for the remaining nodes in
the graph. Nevertheless, for the other two ranking methods rank
by # retweeted and rank by degree, GCMs performance is a lot
more robust. When the training set percentage is reduced from
100% to 2%, GCM constantly gives exactly the same classication
results (best among all: 96.96% precision, 95.63% recall, and 96.29%
F-measure). Only when the training set is reduced below 2% (i.e.,
less than two positive and two negative instances), the GCM
classier fails to work.
6. Discussion
Our experimental study helps us answer the three research
questions. The results also provide us with several interesting
insights into the interaction dynamics of online debates on social
media such as Twitter.
The main challenges for opinion mining on Twitter data include
the short length (i.e., 140-character limit) and informal style. Given
limited word features and high variations in style, traditional CC
showed poor predictive capability for differentiating users with
opposite opinions. People can say different entities to express their
opinions. However, their precise words may not clearly reveal
which side they take in a debate. It is important to consider that a
debate must involve people from two sides arguing against each
other. On each side, remarks of opinionated leaders can be widely
spread by supporters via actions such as retweet and like on a
social media platform. Such interaction and communication
results in a high degree of connectivity in social networks. These
linkages between users become an additional and evidently more
Please cite this article in press as: J. Li, et al., User opinion classication in social media: A global consistency maximization approach, Inf.
Manage. (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2016.06.004
reliable source for opinion classication. Link-based classiers,
such as LP and GCM, consider that users opinions are not
independent, but interrelated. Rather than predicting the opinion
of each individual user separately, LP and GCM try to collectively
classify users based on their linkage structures. In a social network
involving two sides debating, linkages may carry a variety of
meanings regarding the relationship between the two connected
users. In our study, we design the classication algorithm based on
a highly simplied assumption that a retweeter tends to share the
same opinion as the retweetee. Even under such a strong
assumption, the classiers can give surprisingly high accuracy.
Moreover, the results of robustness tests further strengthen our
conclusion on the superiority of link-based opinion classiers over
CC, particularly when only a small training set is available. As
shown in Fig. 3, CC show ne robustness against reduced training
set size. Particularly for the rank by # tweets method, the
classication accuracy (72%) did not drop much until the training
set was reduced to approximately 10%. This might be partly
attributed to the high degree of information redundancy exhibited
in tweets and retweets, especially during a short time period of
debate on one specic topic. Even visibly opinionated users do not
always post original tweets. They retweet, too. As long as we have
enough content (tweets and retweets) from the most active users,
CC can still show appreciable performance. By contrast, for link-
based classiers, if chosen wisely (e.g., based on rank by #
retweeted and rank by degree), only a handful (e.g., one or two
instances from each class) of visibly opinionated users could be
sufcient as training data instances to achieve the highest
classication accuracy (93%). Nevertheless, the link-based
classier, GCM, could become unpredictable if some critical
annotated nodes are left out (e.g., based on rank by # tweets
and rank by # followers). Therefore, the connectivity to other
nodes in the graph is key to robust performance of link-based
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Fig. 5. Robustness Test for GCM (performance vs.% of training data used).
classiers. During an online debate, opinion leaders may not
necessarily be the most active tweeters or well-known celebrities
with the most followers. Rather, given a reasonable size of
followers, someone who posts tweets with sharp opinions or
brilliant remarks, as long as they get more retweets, can stand out
as real leaders of public opinion. Successfully identifying these
critical opinionated users could guarantee a high accuracy for
opinion classication with only minimum effort to create a
training data set. On the contrary, if inappropriate ranking
methods were chosen, one may fail to identify the real critical
opinionated users, which can lead to low accuracy of opinion
classication. Furthermore, identication of the critical users and
further analyzing their content and behaviors can provide better
insights into the key arguments and political appeal.
7. Conclusions and future directions
In this study, we propose a GCM algorithm to address the
collective opinion classication problem. Our algorithm
collectively assigns users states in Twitter discussions that match
their retweeting behaviors to others postings. In experiments on a
real-world data set, the proposed approach is signicantly more
accurate than the state-of-the-art approach. Further analysis
shows that our proposed algorithm performs exceptionally well
even with only a handful of training users.
Classifying user opinions is a critical challenge for e-commerce
companies. This study provides a novel opinion classication
solution that addresses the volume, velocity, and variety issues of
big social media data. By analyzing a large amount of opinion-
related data in microblogging sites, our solution based on GCM
exploits the social interactions among users for classication. It
Please cite this article in press as: J. Li, et al., User opinion classication in social media: A global consistency maximization approach, Inf.
Manage. (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2016.06.004
9
shows high accuracy and robustness to the limited size of labeled
data for training.
This study has signicant practical and theoretical implications
for big data analytics in e-commerce. For practitioners, a more
accurate classier that requires a smaller training data set can
signicantly reduce the effort needed to plan and conduct
marketing campaigns. Facing a social network of competitive
opinions, companies need to develop different marketing
strategies for populations that are for or against their products.
By conducting opinion classication on a topic at multiple time
points, companies can obtain a dynamic view of how opinions
evolve over time so that they can react and adjust their strategies
accordingly. In the big-data era, such data-driven analytics will
become increasingly important to commerce. Moreover, our
results provide support for further theoretical studies on the
global consistency of social networks in social media analytics. As
we have argued, global consistency may be accounted for by the
joint force of network connectivity and social inuence. Unlike
most previous research focused on individual-level inuences, our
study indicates the existence of global-level self-organization
phenomenon, which is worth further investigation.
In the future, we will explore the following directions to extend
this study. (1) We will investigate the combination of content data
and linkage data for collective opinion classication. (2) We will
investigate social network structures other than two-sided debates
on social media and develop new opinion classication algorithms.
(3) We will continue studying factors (e.g., topics and stages of
events) that can affect the performance of opinion classication in
more social media data sets and contexts. Our ultimate goal is to
build an effective approach that is scalable to incorporate insights
from social relationships for opinion mining.
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Jiexun Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Decision Sciences, College of
Business & Economics, at Western Washington University. He earned his Ph.D. in
MIS from the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona, M.S and B.S
in MIS at Tsinghua University in China. His research interests include data mining,
business analytics, social media analytics, and health informatics. His research has
appeared in journals including JMIS, DSS, IEEE Transactions, JASIST, JAIS,
Bioinformatics, CACM, ESA, ISF, and so on.
Xin Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Systems at the City
University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems
from the University of Arizona. He received his Bachelors and Master's degrees
from the Department of Automation at Tsinghua University, China. His work has
appeared in the MISQ, JMIS, INFORMS JOC, DSS, JASIST, ACM and IEEE Transactions,
among others.
Bin Zhu is an Associate Professor of Business Information Systems at Oregon State
University. She earned her Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from
University of Arizona. Her current research interests include business intelligence,
information analysis, social network, human-computer interaction, information
visualization, computer-mediated communication, and knowledge management
systems. Her work has appeared in ISR, DSS, JASIST, IEEE Transactions, D-Lib
Magazine, and so on.