New preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.4475. The title is changing to: “Information-Theoretic Measures of Influence Based on Content Dynamics”. I’ll give a detailed, readable summary in a week or two. I’ll be presenting about this at WIN workshop, so please come!

For now, imagine the following problem. There are hundreds of people in a large room talking to each other. You can hear what everybody is saying, but you don’t know who’s talking to whom. How could you figure it out, based on the what they are saying? If one person says something, and another responds, we can usually tell that it fits with the original statement somehow. We quantify this intuition using information theory. If we interpret both people’s utterances as arbitrary signals, then we can use very general information theoretic tools to tell us if one signal is predictable from the other. I.e., one person’s statements are more predictable if we know what the other person is saying.