Computational Intelligence for Big Social Data Analysis [Guest Editorial].

The articles in this special section focus on computational intelligence for big social data analytics. In the eras of social connectedness and social colonization, people are becoming increasingly enthusiastic about interacting, sharing, and collaborating through online collaborative media. In recent years, this collective intelligence has spread to many different areas, with particular focus on fields related to everyday life such as commerce, tourism, education, and health, causing the size of the Social Web to expand exponentially. The distillation of knowledge from such a large amount of unstructured information, however, is an extremely difficult task, as the contents of today's Web are perfectly suitable for human consumption, but remain hardly understandable to machines. Big social data analysis grows out of this need and combines multiple disciplines such as social network analysis, multimedia management, social media analytics, trend discovery, and opinion mining.