Knowledge Enabled Location Prediction of Twitter Users

As the popularity of online social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook continues to rise, the volume of textual content generated on the web is increasing rapidly. The mining of user generated content in social media has proven effective in domains ranging from personalization and recommendation systems to crisis management. These applications stand to be further enhanced by incorporating information about the geo-position of social media users in their analysis. Due to privacy concerns, users are largely reluctant to share their location information. As a consequence of this, researchers have focused on automatic inferencing of location information from the contents of a user\u27s tweets. Existing approaches are purely data-driven and require large training data sets of geotagged tweets. Furthermore, these approaches rely solely on social media features or probabilistic language models and fail to capture the underlying semantics of the tweets. In this thesis, we propose a novel knowledge based approach that does not require any training data. Our approach uses Wikipedia, a crowd sourced knowledge base, to extract entities that are relevant to a location. We refer to these entities as local entities. Additionally, we score the relevance of each local entity with respect to the city, using the Wikipedia Hyperlink Graph. We predict the most likely location of the user by matching the scored entities of a city and the entities mentioned by users in their tweets. We evaluate our approach on a publicly available data set consisting of 5119 Twitter users across continental United States and show comparable accuracy to the state-of-the-art approaches. Our results demonstrate the ability to pinpoint the location of a Twitter user to a state and a city using Wikipedia, without needing to train a probabilistic model

A Topic Recommender for Journalists

The way in which people acquire information on events and form their own opinion on them has changed dramatically with the advent of social media. For many readers, the news gathered from online sources become an opportunity to share points of view and information within micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter, mainly aimed at satisfying their communication needs. Furthermore, the need to deepen the aspects related to news stimulates a demand for additional information which is often met through online encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia. This behaviour has also influenced the way in which journalists write their articles, requiring a careful assessment of what actually interests the readers. The goal of this paper is to present a recommender system, What to Write and Why, capable of suggesting to a journalist, for a given event, the aspects still uncovered in news articles on which the readers focus their interest. The basic idea is to characterize an event according to the echo it receives in online news sources and associate it with the corresponding readers’ communicative and informative patterns, detected through the analysis of Twitter and Wikipedia, respectively. Our methodology temporally aligns the results of this analysis and recommends the concepts that emerge as topics of interest from Twitter and Wikipedia, either not covered or poorly covered in the published news articles

An Information Diffusion-Based Recommendation Framework for Micro-Blogging

Micro-blogging is increasingly evolving from a daily chatting tool into a critical platform for individuals and organizations to seek and share real-time news updates during emergencies. However, seeking and extracting useful information from micro-blogging sites poses significant challenges due to the volume of the traffic and the presence of a large body of irrelevant personal messages and spam. In this paper, we propose a novel recommendation framework to overcome this problem. By analyzing information diffusion patterns among a large set of micro-blogs that play the role of emergency news providers, our approach selects a small subset as recommended emergency news feeds for regular users. We evaluate our diffusion-based recommendation framework on Twitter during the early outbreak of H1N1 Flu. The evaluation results show that our method results in more balanced and comprehensive recommendations compared to benchmark approaches

Living analytics methods for the social web

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Predicting Social Links for New Users across Aligned Heterogeneous Social Networks

Online social networks have gained great success in recent years and many of them involve multiple kinds of nodes and complex relationships. Among these relationships, social links among users are of great importance. Many existing link prediction methods focus on predicting social links that will appear in the future among all users based upon a snapshot of the social network. In real-world social networks, many new users are joining in the service every day. Predicting links for new users are more important. Different from conventional link prediction problems, link prediction for new users are more challenging due to the following reasons: (1) differences in information distributions between new users and the existing active users (i.e., old users); (2) lack of information from the new users in the network. We propose a link prediction method called SCAN-PS (Supervised Cross Aligned Networks link prediction with Personalized Sampling), to solve the link prediction problem for new users with information transferred from both the existing active users in the target network and other source networks through aligned accounts. We proposed a within-target-network personalized sampling method to process the existing active users' information in order to accommodate the differences in information distributions before the intra-network knowledge transfer. SCAN-PS can also exploit information in other source networks, where the user accounts are aligned with the target network. In this way, SCAN-PS could solve the cold start problem when information of these new users is total absent in the target network.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 4 table