Mining the conversation

After focusing on user profiles and how they are explicitly connected via follower/friend relationships, in this section, we will analyze a different type of interaction-the conversation. On Twitter, users can publish a tweet in reply to a particular piece of content. When two or more users follow up with this process, a proper conversation can unfold.

Figure 3.3 shows a conversation represented as a network. Each node of the network is a tweet (uniquely identified by its ID) and each edge represents a reply to relationship.

This type of relationship has an explicit direction as it can only go in one way (parent-child relationship). For example, if tweet 2 is a reply to tweet 1, we cannot see tweet 1 being a reply to tweet 2. The cardinality of this relationship is always one, meaning that a given tweet can be a reply to one and only one tweet (but we can have multiple tweets in reply to a given one, making the relationship a one-to-many). Moreover, cycles are not...