Followee recommendation in twitter using fuzzy link prediction.

In social networking sites, it is useful to receive recommendations about whom to contact or follow. These recommendations not only allow to establish connections with people one might already know in real life, but also with people or users that have similar interests or are potentially interesting. We propose an approach that tackles contact (followee) recommendation in Twitter by means of fuzzy logic. This fuzzy approach handles recommendation as a link prediction problem and uses three types of similarity between a pair of users: tweet similarity, followee id similarity, and followee tweet similarity. These similarities are calculated by extracting user profiles. These profiles are, in turn, obtained by considering Twitter as a heterogeneous information network. To test our approach, we crawled a repository of 6,000 users and 2 million tweets, and we measured accuracy by comparing our results with the actual followee lists of the users. These results, which are also compared against the results given by state-of-the-art methods, show a high accuracy. Other advantages of the fuzzy system include a self-explanatory capability and the ability to produce a non-binary friendship value

Followee Recommendation in Microblog Using Matrix Factorization Model with Structural Regularization

Microblog that provides us a new communication and information sharing platform has been growing exponentially since it emerged just a few years ago. To microblog users, recommending followees who can serve as high quality information sources is a competitive service. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a matrix factorization model with structural regularization to improve the accuracy of followee recommendation in microblog. More specifically, we adapt the matrix factorization model in traditional item recommender systems to followee recommendation in microblog and use structural regularization to exploit structure information of social network to constrain matrix factorization model. The experimental analysis on a real-world dataset shows that our proposed model is promising

Personalizing Recommendation in Micro-blog Social Networks and E-Commerce

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Emotional Tendency Analysis of Twitter Data Streams

The web now seems to be an alive and dynamic arena in which billions of people across the globe connect, share, publish, and engage in a broad range of everyday activities. Using social media, individuals may connect and communicate with each other at any time and from any location. More than 500 million individuals across the globe post their thoughts and opinions on the internet every day. There is a huge amount of information created from a variety of social media platforms in a variety of formats and languages throughout the globe. Individuals define emotions as powerful feelings directed toward something or someone as a result of internal or external events that have a personal meaning. Emotional recognition in text has several applications in human-computer interface and natural language processing (NLP). Emotion classification has previously been studied using bag-of words classifiers or deep learning methods on static Twitter data. For real-time textual emotion identification, the proposed model combines a mix of keyword-based and learning-based models, as well as a real-time Emotional Tendency Analysi

Network-aware recommendations in online social networks

Along with the rapid increase of using social networks sites such as Twitter, a massive number of tweets published every day which generally affect the users decision to forward what they receive of information, and result in making them feel overwhelmed with this information. Then, it is important for this services to help the users not lose their focus from what is close to their interests, and to find potentially interesting tweets. The problem that can occur in this case is called information overload, where an individual will encounter too much information in a short time period. For instance, in Twitter, the user can see a large number of tweets posted by her followees. To sort out this issue, recommender systems are used to give contents that match the user's needs. This thesis presents a tweet-recommendation approach aiming at proposing novel tweets to users and achieving improvement over baseline. For this reason, we propose to exploit network, content, and retweet analyses for making recommendations of tweets. The main objective of this research is to recommend tweets that are unseen by the user (i.e., they do not appear in the user timeline) because nobody in her social circles published or retweeted them. To achieve this goal, we create the user's ego-network up to depth two and apply the transitivity property of the \emph{friends-of-friends} relationship to determine interesting recommendations. After this step, we apply cosine similarity and Jaccard distance as similarity measures for the candidate tweets obtained from the network analysis using bigrams. We also count the mutual retweets between the ego user and candidate users as a measure of shared similar tastes. The values of these features are compared together for each of the candidate tweets using pairwise comparisons in order to determine interesting recommendations that are ranked to best match the user's interests. Experimental results demonstrate through a real user study that our approach improves the state-of-the-art technique. In addition to the efficiency of our approach in finding relevant contents, it is also characterized by the fact of providing novel tweets, which solves the over-specialization challenge or serendipity problem that appears when using content-based recommender systems as a stand alone approach of recommendation

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