Communication characteristics of instant messaging

摘要

Instant Messaging is a popular medium for both social and work-related communication. In this paper we report an investigation of the effect of interpersonal relationship on underlying basic communication characteristics (such as messaging rate and duration) using a large corpus of instant messages. Our results show that communication characteristics differ significantly for communications between users who are in a work relationship and between users who are in a social relationship. We used our findings to inform the creation of statistical models that predict the relationship between users without the use of message content -- achieving an accuracy of nearly 80% for one such model. We discuss the results of our analyses and potential uses of these models.