Wanted: A Unified Model for Search in Social Media

Social Media, including wikis, micro-blogging, forums and social network services, plays an indispensable role in providing a platform to support user-generated and user-disseminated information through social interactions. Social Media provides participants faster and wider information spread and burst compared to traditional media channels, which has attracted significant attention from the research community. In addition, due to its diversity of representation and operation mechanisms, different kinds of tasks are usually supported by different Social Media services or sometimes combinations of them. For example, blogs are usually maintained by individuals while forums are maintained by “moderators” and all users may participate in discussions by writing posts and replies. The differences in design and structure permit them to serve different purposes. Therefore, people use blogs to express personal feelings, opinions and comments but use forums to discuss problems and receive suggestions, though there is no strict line between these two types of Social Media. Due to this diversity, research in Social Media in recent years mainly focuses in two directions: how to effectively support specific tasks that one or several particular Social Media services provide as the example mentioned above, and how to improve the effectiveness of search engines that can take advantage of rich information that Social Media generates. In both directions, research work is usually conducted on a small number of types of Social Media services. In fact, most of them focus on only one type of Social Media. For instance, work has been done to help Community Question Answering portals (CQA) like Yahoo! Answers to retrieve similar question-answer pairs more effectively (e.g., [4]). Researchers also pay attention to social bookmarking systems and try to use them to help users organize information. Blogs are used to track opinions and sentiments while micro-blogging tools like Twitter are used to identify emerging trends and hot topics. Although certain success has been shown in these distinct types of Social Media, little research work has been done to discuss whether or not we need a unified way to deal with all types of Social Media, which could then support notyet-imagined tasks rather than developing separate models for each Social Media service. Here, a unified model should provide a “baseline” model which