Dreamcatcher: Synthesizing the Cognitive Maps of Collectivities

Myriam Abramson Naval Research Laboratory Washington, DC 20375 myriam.abramson@nrl.navy.mil

Abstract Dreamcatcher is a blueprint for synthesizing the cognitive maps of collectivities to gain insights into their beliefs, desires and intents. As the ease of producing and disseminating opinions on the Web increases through the proliferation of weblogs, there is a need to understand the formation and the propagation of opinions in the social context of the Web. Although opinions are not reliable predictors of behavior at the individual level, they have been shown reliable at the collective level, for example, in prediction markets. Dreamcatcher combines discovery, learning and inferencing to produce dynamic cognitive maps from a set of weblogs. The specic problems related to the nature of weblogs and the key issues are outlined.

1 Introduction
Beyond the macrocospic view of blog sites and microcospic view of blogposts [5], it is interesting to study the content of blogs themselves, or memetic view, for the discovery of opinions and trends of opinions. Once blogs have been aggregated and classied by topics and sentiment analysis and that structural patterns have been found, what conclusions can be inferred from the ideas and opinions themselves? Cognitive maps are representations of the inferences we make, explicitly or implicitly. They have been used in the social sciences to represent and explain the reasoning found behind complex political decisions [4] and the impact of school reforms on student engagement [6]. We claim that the cognitive map of collectivities, such as those formed virtually through weblogs and social media, might be different from the cognitive map of any single individual and might better describe collective intelligence to infer trends of public opinion than polling methods. The overall technical approach and key issues in deriving cognitive maps from weblogs are rst presented. We then discuss the possible types of inference that can

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be made from the cognitive maps obtained and conclude with possible uses of this approach.

+0.65 -0.35 Population Well-being

Strength of Government -0.25

+0.25 +0.15 Cooperation with Localities

+0.75 Intimidation Population Hardship +0.8 +0.8 -0.25 +0.65 +0.45 -0.25 Infrastructure -0.25 Insurgency -0.25 -0.35 Military Strikes +0.25 Force Protection -0.35 Police -0.45 Cultural Understanding

Fig. 1 Counter-insurgeny cognitive map manually extracted from several documents

2 Approach
Cognitive maps are graphical models of causal assertions expressed as directed edges between concept nodes. They differ from other graphical representations, such as Bayesian nets and inuence diagrams, mainly because feedback loops, i.e. cycles, are possible to express many common beliefs and paradoxes (Fig. 1). Positive or negative causality are specied on the edges to indicate whether an increased strength in the causal node effects an increased or decreased strength in the related node. Concept nodes can be further differentiated into policy and outcome nodes (desirable and undesirable) to formulate and predict the effect of different strategies [4][7]. This representation can be extended to a collectivity by parsing and aggregating several documents. In order to achieve this goal, some key issues must be addressed. Gated information sharing projects try to foster a community linked by interest and purpose. In the unrestricted connectivity of the Web, virtual communities form in an ad hoc manner and the problem becomes to identify dynamic groups. It is not enough to link individuals through blogs and comments in a social network since they could have different opinions. There is a need to identify a collectivity through a combination of cluster analysis based on textual content and sentiment analysis.

Dreamcatcher: Synthesizing the Cognitive Maps of Collectivities

Sentiment analysis further discriminates documents based on the polarity of the opinions expressed at the sentence level. Once a collectivity has been identied, it remains to extract qualitative causal relations from unstructured text using information extraction patterns, determine their positive/negative qualitative relationship, and quantify the strength of those relations (based on qualier words such as inevitably, best, etc.). Culture needs to be taken into account to evaluate the relative strength of opinions. While certain words, such as augment or inhibit, directly denote positive/negative causal relationships, causal relations are difcult to identify from predicate keywords alone. There is an implied causality from temporal clauses. For example, as the projects progress ... the attacks become less frequent. Often, an implied causality can be inferred from an entire storyline. For example, the Cinderella story has an underlying message that hard work will lead to success embedded in its narrative (Fig. 2).

+ Success Working Hard

Fig. 2 Cultural Belief

The validity of those causal relations can be evaluated by similarity to those extracted by human readers. Once causal relations have been extracted and their associated cause and effect concepts generalized, opinion rules can be learned as association rules. The inuence score of blog posts weighs the causal relations in determining the condence of an opinion rule. The strength of the causal relations contributes to the support of the rule. As a nal step, implied causal assertions from cultural norms and common sense reasoning need to augment the rule set in order to synthesize intelligible cognitive maps. In an online setting, the temporal overlap of the causal relations determines the temporal frame of a cognitive map. The overall framework is illustrated in Fig. 3.

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Fig. 3 Dreamcatcher architecture

3 Reputation
The inuence of social media on current events has been noted in several occasions from the Polish revolution of 1980 and the inuence of catholicism to the use of the internet to spread terrorism [8] or to convey a more accurate picture of events [9]. Recognition is one of the many facets of inuence [3] but, in contrast to pagerank mechanisms, should be qualitatively evaluated. All beliefs are not created equal. Some weight more than other if they are contained in a reputable blog. A reputation score can be computed from inbound links where a blog is quoted positively or negatively using the inference mechanism of cognitive maps (see below in Section 4) that takes into account the qualitative reference aspects.

Dreamcatcher: Synthesizing the Cognitive Maps of Collectivities

Fig. 4 Reputation of blogs

4 Inference
After a cognitive map has been synthesized from the opinion rules discovered, it is possible to infer the strength of the concept nodes through stochastic dynamic programming. The strength of a node Ai is dened recursively from an initial value, possibly random, and its causes A j where Pji is the condence of the rule A j Ai and W ji is the strength of the causal relation between Ai and A j (Eq. 1).
causes

Ai (t + 1) f (Ai (t) +

j=1

PjiW ji AJ (t))

(1)

If the function is a sigmoid function, this value is bounded within [0, 1] and can be evaluated comparatively with other value nodes. The process iterates until no changes occur. Beliefs or soft events can be inferred such as strength of government or condence in the economy [1]. Because predictions are made about opinions, they cant always be veried with occurring events although there might be strong correlations between them that might help to identify tipping points. Provided some knowledge about the desirability of certain outcome nodes can be obtained, another type of inference is possible through agent-based simulation . By

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seeding an agent population with the cognitive maps obtained from diverse groups, interactions can be simulated by merging their cognitive maps and inferring the value of desirable/undesirable outcome nodes. Agents move closer or farther from other agents in the cognitive space depending on the outcome of their interactions, and learn to modify their cognitive map by imitation from their neighbors (peers) through a social learning method [2]. Agents of change can be introduced to measure their effect on coalition formation. For example, an avatar can be introduced to bridge or polarize virtual communities.

Conclusion
A dreamcatcher is a hoop ensnaring a spider web and used as a charm to protect against bad dreams. Likewise, Dreamcatcher tries to capture a part of the Web and understand opinions and ideologies. This work is at the intersection of machine reading, data mining and inference. Beyond predictive analysis and information warfare, Dreamcatcher can help summarize and visualize the content of weblogs and provide a tool for collective decision-making.

References
1. Abramson, M.: Causal Emergence of "Soft" Events. In: AAAI Fall Symposium, Workshop on Emergent Agents and Socialities (2007) 2. Abramson, M.: Coalition formation of cognitive agents. In: AAAI Fall Symposium, Workshop on Cultural Adaptive Agents (2008) 3. Agarwal, N., Liu, H., Tang, L., Yu, P.S.: Identifying the inuential bloggers in a community. In: First Intl Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM08) (2008) 4. Axelrod, R., Nozicka, G.J., Shapiro, M.J. (eds.): The Structure of Decision: The Cognitive Maps of Political Elites. Princeton University Press (1976) 5. Finin, T., Josh, A., Kolari, P., Java, A., Kale, A., Karandikar, A.: The information ecology of social media and online communities. AI Magazine 29(3) (2008) 6. Goldspink, C.: School reform: an exploratory case study of the impact of student-centred learning in two primarcy schools. Retrieved from http://learningtolearn.sa.edu.au/ on 01/18/09 7. Kosko, B.: Fuzzy cognitive maps. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 24, 6575 (1986) 8. Weimann, G.: Terror on the Internet: The New Arena, the New Challenges. The United States Institute of Peace (USIP) (2006) 9. Woodward, M.: Burmas generals and cyclone nargis: Incompetence, callous indifference or both? COMPOS Journal: Analysis, Commentary and News from the World of Strategic Communications pp. 118 (2008)