Influence Discovery in Semantic Networks: An Initial Approach

Assessing the influence between concepts, which include people, physical objects, as well as theoretical ideas, plays a crucial role in understanding and discovering knowledge. Despite the huge amount of literature on knowledge discovery in semantic networks, there has been little attempt to fully classify and investigate the influence, which also includes causality, of a semantic entity on another one as dynamical entities. In this paper we will introduce an approach to discover and assess influence among nodes in a semantic network, with the aim to provide a tool to identify its type and direction. Even though this is still being developed, the preliminary evaluation shows promising and interesting results.