Beyond FOAF: Challenges in Characterizing Social Relations

We discuss the results of a study on characterizing interpersonal social relationships in terms of their emotional intensity and valence in the context of several preliminary studies on the representation of social relations and the detection and characterization of individual relationships from online communication. A common aspect of these studies is the conclusion that the in-depth analysis of social relations is a hard problem, which cannot be solved by simple application of methods from the fields of social network analysis, NLP, or machine learning. We attempt to identify the contributing factors to the complexity of the problem, pointing out directions for future research.