A multilayer network analysis of hashtags in twitter via co-occurrence and semantic links

Abstract

Complex network studies, as an interdisciplinary framework, span a large variety of subjects including social media. In social networks, several mechanisms generate miscellaneous structures like friendship networks, mention networks, tag networks, etc. Focusing on tag networks (namely, hashtags in twitter), we made a two-layer analysis of tag networks from a massive dataset of Twitter entries. The first layer is constructed by converting the co-occurrences of these tags in a single entry (tweet) into links, while the second layer is constructed converting the semantic relations of the tags into links. We observed that the universal properties of the real networks like small-world property, clustering and power-law distributions in various network parameters are also evident in the multilayer network of hashtags. Moreover, we outlined that co-occurrences of hashtags in tweets are mostly coupled with semantic relations, whereas a small number of semantically unrelated, therefore random links reduce node separation and network diameter in the co-occurrence network layer. Together with the degree distributions, the power-law consistencies of degree difference, edge weight and cosine similarity distributions in both layers are also appealing forms of Zipf’s law evident in nature.