PFU: Profiling Forum users in online social networks, a knowledge driven data mining approach

Online Social Networks (OSNs) provide platform to raise opinions on various issues, create and spread news rapidly in Online Social Network Forums (OSNFs). This work proposes a novel method for Profiling Forum Users (PFU) by exploring their behavioral characteristics based on their involvement in various topics of discussion and number of posts in respective topics posted by them in OSNFs dynamically. Modeling the proposed method mathematically, the PFU algorithm is illustrated for its adequacy and accuracy

A Knowledge-Based Topic Modeling Approach for Automatic Topic Labeling

Probabilistic topic models, which aim to discover latent topics in text corpora define each document as a multinomial distributions over topics and each topic as a multinomial distributions over words. Although, humans can infer a proper label for each topic by looking at top representative words of the topic but, it is not applicable for machines. Automatic Topic Labeling techniques try to address the problem. The ultimate goal of topic labeling techniques are to assign interpretable labels for the learned topics. In this paper, we are taking concepts of ontology into consideration instead of words alone to improve the quality of generated labels for each topic. Our work is different in comparison with the previous efforts in this area, where topics are usually represented with a batch of selected words from topics. We have highlighted some aspects of our approach including: 1) we have incorporated ontology concepts with statistical topic modeling in a unified framework, where each topic is a multinomial probability distribution over the concepts and each concept is represented as a distribution over words; and 2) a topic labeling model according to the meaning of the concepts of the ontology included in the learned topics. The best topic labels are selected with respect to the semantic similarity of the concepts and their ontological categorizations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of considering ontological concepts as richer aspects between topics and words by comprehensive experiments on two different data sets. In another word, representing topics via ontological concepts shows an effective way for generating descriptive and representative labels for the discovered topics

A Survey of Location Prediction on Twitter

Locations, e.g., countries, states, cities, and point-of-interests, are central to news, emergency events, and people's daily lives. Automatic identification of locations associated with or mentioned in documents has been explored for decades. As one of the most popular online social network platforms, Twitter has attracted a large number of users who send millions of tweets on daily basis. Due to the world-wide coverage of its users and real-time freshness of tweets, location prediction on Twitter has gained significant attention in recent years. Research efforts are spent on dealing with new challenges and opportunities brought by the noisy, short, and context-rich nature of tweets. In this survey, we aim at offering an overall picture of location prediction on Twitter. Specifically, we concentrate on the prediction of user home locations, tweet locations, and mentioned locations. We first define the three tasks and review the evaluation metrics. By summarizing Twitter network, tweet content, and tweet context as potential inputs, we then structurally highlight how the problems depend on these inputs. Each dependency is illustrated by a comprehensive review of the corresponding strategies adopted in state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, we also briefly review two related problems, i.e., semantic location prediction and point-of-interest recommendation. Finally, we list future research directions.Comment: Accepted to TKDE. 30 pages, 1 figur

SAR: A sentiment-aspect-region model for user preference analysis in geo-tagged reviews

Abstract—Many location based services, such as FourSquare, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google Places, etc., allow users to compose reviews or tips on points of interest (POIs), each having a geographical coordinates. These services have accumulated a large amount of such geo-tagged review data, which allows deep analysis of user preferences in POIs. This paper studies two types of user preferences to POIs: topical-region preference and category aware topical-aspect preference. We propose a unified probabilistic model to capture these two preferences simultaneously. In addition, our model is capable of capturing the interaction of different factors, including topical aspect, sentiment, and spatial information. The model can be used in a number of applications, such as POI recommendation and user recommendation, among others. In addition, the model enables us to investigate whether people like an aspect of a POI or whether people like a topical aspect of some type of POIs (e.g., bars) in a region, which offer explanation for recommendations. Experiments on real world datasets show that the model achieves significant improvement in POI recommendation and user rec-ommendation in comparison to the state-of-the-art methods. We also propose an efficient online recommendation algorithm based on our model, which saves up to 90 % computation time. I