E-MEME: Epidemiological Modeling of the Evolution of MEssages

Unofficial means of communication, such as internet blogs and forums and word-of-mouth contacts, provide an ideal medium for the spread of ideas within a society. While many of these topics are benign or even beneficial to the population, there are messages which have dangerous and destructive consequences, such as calls for terrorist attacks. The spread of information within a population is in many ways analogous to the spread of disease. The field of mathematical epidemiology provides a vast array of models which can be modified for the current problem. In order to better analyze the dynamics of information propagation, we propose to build the Epidemiological Modeling of the Evolution of MEssages (E-MEME) tool. E-MEME combines statistical language processing technologies to discover latent topics found in website text with epidemiological modeling techniques to understand and predict the means by which messages propagate. E-MEME will give users the ability to analyze the diffusion of topics across internet websites.