Sentence examples for topical alignment from inspiring English sources
In Section 4.4 we observed topical alignment as a static property of the network.
Since we verified that the topical alignment, which denotes a homophily phenomenon between users [64], is not purely due to assortative patterns, we can ascribe this phenomenon to selection or to social influence.
For instance, when considering books as a feature, the topical alignment can be measured by computing the similarity between the book sets of pairs of users as a function of their distance on the network.
A quick decay of the similarity with the distance (for both the cosine similarity and the number of common items) gives a strong clue of the presence of a local topical alignment.
It is therefore of interest to compare the topical alignment on the social links that effectively are the support of communication (' Social ∩ Comm ', in the notation of Table 3) with the alignment along the subset of social links on which no communication is observed (' Social ∖ Comm ', in the notation of Table 3).
Figure 8 shows that the former is larger than the latter, but only slightly: interestingly, strong alignment effects exist even on a network along which no explicit communication flows, and are almost as strong as in the network of communication. Figure 8 Topical alignment in the interaction graph.
We call topical local alignment a static property of the social network for which pairs of individuals that are close in the social graph are more similar than pairs separated by larger distances on the network.
Figure 7 Topical and geographical alignment.
