Phrase-based hashtag recommendation for microblog posts

In microblogs, authors use hashtags to mark keywords or topics. These manually labeled tags can be used to benefit various live social media applications (e.g., microblog retrieval, classification). However, because only a small portion of microblogs contain hashtags, recommending hashtags for use in microblogs are a worthwhile exercise. In addition, human inference often relies on the intrinsic grouping of words into phrases. However, existing work uses only unigrams to model corpora. In this work, we propose a novel phrase-based topical translation model to address this problem. We use the bag-of-phrases model to better capture the underlying topics of posted microblogs. We regard the phrases and hashtags in a microblog as two different languages that are talking about the same thing. Thus, the hashtag recommendation task can be viewed as a translation process from phrases to hashtags. To handle the topical information of microblogs, the proposed model regards translation probability as being topic specific. We test the methods on data collected from realworld microblogging services. The results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods that use the unigram model.     

Exploring the effect of user engagement in online brand communities: Evidence from Twitter

Social media such as forums, blogs and microblogs has been increasingly used for public information sharing and opinions exchange nowadays. It has changed the way how online community interacts and somehow has led to a new trend of engagement for online retailers especially on microblogging websites such as Twitter. In this study, we investigated the impact of online retailers' engagement with the online brand communities on users' perception of brand image and service. Firstly, we analysed the overall sentiment trends of different brands and the patterns of engagement between companies and customers using the collected tweets posted on a popular social media platform, Twitter. Then, we studied how different types of engagements affect customer sentiments. Our analysis shows that engagement has an effect on sentiments that associate with brand image, perception and customer service of the online retailers. Our findings indicate that the level, length, type and attitude of retailers' engagement with social media users have a significant impact on their sentiments. Based on our results, we derived several important managerial and practical implications.     

一种基于聚类的微博关键词提取方法的研究与实现

文章提出了一种基于聚类的微博关键词提取方法。实验过程分三个步骤进行。第一步,对微博文本进行预处理和分词处理,再运用TF-IDF算法与TextRank算法计算词语权重,针对微博短文本的特性在计算词语权重时运用加权计算的方法,在得到词语权重后使用聚类算法提取候选关键词;第二步,根据n-gram语言模型的理论,取n的值为2定义最大左邻概率和最大右邻概率,据此对候选关键词进行扩展;第三步,根据语义扩展模型中邻接变化数和语义单元数的概念,对扩展后的关键词进行筛选,得到最终的提取结果。实验结果表明在处理短文本时Text Ramk算法比TF-IDF算法表现更佳,同时该方法能够有效地提取出微博中的关键词。     

基于用户扩展兴趣的微博推荐方法

为解决微博用户兴趣提取不准确的问题,提出一种基于用户扩展兴趣的微博推荐方法。该方法将用户个体兴趣与关联兴趣结合为用户扩展兴趣进行微博推荐。其中,用户个体兴趣从用户标签、发布微博及交互微博中提取;用户关联兴趣通过用户与其关注用户间的关注关系强度、交互频繁程度和个体兴趣相似度获取。最后,计算用户扩展兴趣与待推荐微博的相似度,对相似度降序排列产生推荐列表。实验结果表明,新方法较传统方法更具有效性和准确性。     

Influence of traits and emotions on boosting status sharing through microblogging

Disclosing status information through microblogging can facilitate effective and efficient electronic word-of-mouth marketing. Therefore, we should understand why people share status information and why certain pieces of content are being shared more often than others. This study adopted an impulsive perspective to investigate status-sharing behaviour in microblogs, which is more spontaneous and unplanned compared with that displayed in traditional virtual communities. Specifically, this study developed a theoretical model to investigate the association among personality traits, emotions, and urge to share status through microblogging. The research model was empirically validated by conducting an online survey among the users of a prevalent microblogging service in China. These users’ urge to share their status was influenced by their personality traits and emotions. Moreover, people with a high level of sharing impulsiveness were inclined to generate negative emotions, whereas those with a high level of inherent novelty seeking could easily induce positive emotions.     

Microblogs recommendations based on implicit similarity in content social networks

With the development of online social networking applications, microblogs have become a necessary online communication network in daily life. Users are interested in obtaining personalized recommendations related to their tastes and needs. In some microblog systems, tags are not available, or the use of tags is rare. In addition, user-specified social relations are extremely rare. Hence, sparsity is a problem in microblog systems. To address this problem, we propose a new framework called Pblog to alleviate sparsity. Pblog identifies users’ interests via their microblogs and social relations and computes implicit similarity among users using a new algorithm. The experimental results indicated that the use of this algorithm can improve the results. In online social networks, such as Twitter, the number of microblogs in the system is high, and it is constantly increasing. Therefore, providing personalized recommendations to target users requires considerable time. To address this problem, the Pblog framework groups similar users using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. Then, Pblog prunes microblogs of the target user group and recommends microblogs with higher ratings to the target user. In the experimental results section, the Pblog framework was compared with several other frameworks. All of these frameworks were run on two datasets: Twitter and Tumblr. Based on the results of these comparisons, the Pblog framework provides more appropriate recommendations to the target user than previous frameworks.

     

个性化微博推荐算法

微博不同于传统的社会网络和电子商务网站,存在用户活跃程度低,微博数据稀疏和用户兴趣动态变化等特点,将传统推荐算法应用于微博推荐时,效果并不理想。提出了一种基于贝叶斯个性化排序的微博推荐算法,对用户进行个性化微博推荐。该基于贝叶斯个性化排序的微博推荐算法,以微博对的形式提取微博系统中的隐式信息,对这些微博对进行学习,从而得到用户对不同微博的兴趣值。根据每条微博发出的时间,估计每条微博对的可信度。发出时间越接近的微博对,它的可信度就越高,并且对用户的兴趣值影响就越大。在新浪微博的真实数据上进行实验和评测,结果表明该基于贝叶斯个性化排序的微博推荐算法相比于对比算法,在进行微博推荐时有更好的效果。     

Hashtag Recommendation Based on Multi-Features of Microblogs

Hashtag recommendation for microblogs is a very hot research topic that is useful to many applications involving microblogs. However, since short text in microblogs and low utilization rate of hashtags will lead to the data sparsity problem, it is difficult for typical hashtag recommendation methods to achieve accurate recommendation. In light of this, we propose HRMF, a hashtag recommendation method based on multi-features of microblogs in this article. First, our HRMF expands short text into long text, and then it simultaneously models multi-features (i.e., user, hashtag, text) of microblogs by designing a new topic model. To further alleviate the data sparsity problem, HRMF exploits hashtags of both similar users and similar microblogs as the candidate hashtags. In particular, to find similar users, HRMF combines the designed topic model with typical user-based collaborative filtering method. Finally, we realize hashtag recommendation by calculating the recommended score of each hashtag based on the generated topical representations of multi-features. Experimental results on a real-world dataset crawled from Sina Weibo demonstrate the effectiveness of our HRMF for hashtag recommendation.     

Automatic extraction of persistent topics from social text streams

Microblogging services allow users to publish their thoughts, activities, and interests in the form of text streams and to share them with others in a social network. A user’s text stream in a microblogging service is temporally composed of the posts the user has written or republished from other socially connected users. In this context, most research on the microblogging service has primarily focused on social graph or topic extraction from the text streams, and in particular, several studies attempted to discover user’s topics of interests from a text stream since the topics play a crucial role in user search, friend recommendation, and contextual advertisement. Yet, they did not yet fully address unique properties of the stream. In this paper, we study a problem of detecting the topics of long-term steady interests to a user from a text stream, considering its dynamic and social characteristics, and propose a graph-based topic extraction model. Extensive experiments have been carried out to investigate the effects of the proposed approach by using a real-world dataset, and the proposed model is shown to produce better performance than the existing alternatives.     

用户关系特征对微博转发行为影响分析研究

转发是微博提供的一个信息传播的机制,用户能够将关注者发布的有趣微博转发到自身平台,然后分享给追随者,是微博网络中信息传播最重要的功能。对于微博网络存在的不同类型连接关系,首先提取出相关特征,如同质性、微网络结构、地理距离以及用户性别等,用于识别连接关系的不同类型,然后采用Log-linear模型来拟合各个特征间系数,基于这些系数对微博用户转发行为形成的内在原因进行了分析。     

Exploring sentiment parsing of microblogging texts for opinion polling on chinese public figures

Microblogging websites such as twitter and Sina Weibo have attracted many users to share their experiences and express their opinions on a variety of topics, making them ideal platforms on which to conduct electronic opinion polls on products, services and public figures. However, conventional sentiment analysis methods for microblogging messages may not meet the demands of opinion polls for public figures. Therefore, in this study, we focus mainly on the problem of sentiment analysis for opinion polling on Chinese public figures. We propose a sentiment parsing-based architecture, which represents and labels opinion targets and their corresponding sentiments jointly to avoid the mismatching of them, for opinion poll of public figures using microblogs. Furthermore, we formulate sentiment parsing of microblogging sentences as a sequence labeling problem and adapt different Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models to train and infer the model. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed sentiment parsing-based methods achieve better performance than conventional sentiment score-based methods in opinion polling on public figures using microblogs.     

Noninfluentials and information dissemination in the microblogging community

Firms are increasingly focusing on understanding and managing their social media strategies in order to create discussions and optimize the spread of news in their communities. Most prior studies on information dissemination have mainly focused on the roles of influentials but ignored the essential for noninfluentials. To fill this gap, this paper takes a holistic view of the information dissemination process and investigates how the participation of both influentials and noninfluentials plays a role in affecting the volume and sentiment of microblogs, which are precursors to raise awareness and attraction for brands. To test our hypotheses, we build a novel econometric model and apply it to a dataset collected from the popular microblogging site Twitter. We have the following main results: (1) back-and-forth-type discussions and retweets are effective in generating awareness and positive attractiveness; (2) influentials or mavens (who have many followers but seldom follow others) help generate initial sparks toward microblogging, but during the cascading periods, the noninfluentials play an important role in driving the conversations; and (3) new users who gradually join the discussions also help increase awareness, although they may not generate a positive sentiment. Our results provide important implications for mediating consumer interactions and firms’ marketing strategies.     

Keyword Query over Error-Tolerant Knowledge Bases

With more and more knowledge provided by WWW, querying and mining the knowledge bases have attracted much research attention. Among all the queries over knowledge bases, which are usually modelled as graphs, a keyword query is the most widely used one. Although the problem of keyword query over graphs has been deeply studied for years, knowledge bases, as special error-tolerant graphs, lead to the results of the traditional defined keyword queries out of users’ satisfaction. Thus, in this paper, we define a new keyword query, called confident r-clique, specific for knowledge bases based on the r-clique definition for keyword query on general graphs, which has been proved to be the best one. However, as we prove in the paper, finding the confident r-cliques is #P-hard. We propose a filtering-and-verification framework to improve the search efficiency. In the filtering phase, we develop the tightest upper bound of the confident r-clique, and design an index together with its search algorithm, which suits the large scale of knowledge bases well. In the verification phase, we develop an efficient sampling method to verify the final answers from the candidates remaining in the filtering phase. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the results derived from our new definition satisfy the users’ requirement better compared with the traditional r-clique definition, and our algorithms are efficient.     

基于二部图投影的微博事件关联分析方法研究

文章针对微博事件相对于传统事件在传播过程中的新特征,提出了利用图论中二部图的理论来获取微博事件间的关联关系的新方法。文中给出了将微博事件和微博用户的关系转换为二部图网络的方法,并根据微博用户在微博事件中的角色特征,给出了微博用户的综合权重,由此来构造“微博事件--微博用户”加权二部图。通过对比多种二部图投影算法,提出了一种基于加权的一维投影算法,在保留二部图结构信息的基础上得出了微博事件间相互关联和影响的定量表示。最后通过实验验证了文章算法的合理性和正确性。     

SNAF: Observation filtering and location inference for event monitoring on twitter

Twitter has recently emerged as a popular microblogging service that has 284 million monthly active users around the world. A part of the 500 million tweets posted on Twitter everyday are personal observations of immediate environment. If provided with time and location information, these observations can be seen as sensory readings for monitoring and localizing objects and events of interests. Location information on Twitter, however, is scarce, with less than 1% of tweets have associated GPS coordinates. Current researches on Twitter location inference mostly focus on city-level or coarser inference, and cannot provide accurate results for fine-grained locations. We propose an event monitoring system for Twitter that emphasizes local events, called SNAF (Sense and Focus). The system filters personal observations posted on Twitter and infers location of each report. Our extensive experiments with real Twitter data show that, the proposed observation filtering approach can have about 22% improvement over existing filtering techniques, and our location inference approach can increase the location accuracy by up to 36% within the 3km error range. By aggregating the observation reports with location information, our prototype event monitoring system can detect real world events, in many case earlier than news reports.     

一种面向微博客文本流的噪音判别与内容相似性双重检测的过滤方法

微博客作为一种新的用户信息传播载体,在网络舆情发起和传播中起着重要作用。由于用户有意(上传广告)、无意(转发)操作所带来的大量噪音微博和相似微博,对网络舆情分析和用户浏览造成极为不利的影响。检测这些噪音微博和相似微博,对微博数据进行提纯,成为一个亟待解决的问题。基于统计数据分析了噪音微博和相似微博的特点,提出一种面向微博文本流的噪音判别和内容相似性双重检测的过滤方法:通过URL链接、字符率、高频词等特征判别,过滤噪音微博;通过分段过滤和索引过滤的双重内容过滤,检测和剔除相似微博。实验表明该方法能有效地对微博数据进行提纯,高效准确地过滤掉相似微博和噪音微博。     

Inferring user interests in microblogging social networks: a survey

With the growing popularity of microblogging services such as Twitter in recent years, an increasing number of users are using these services in their daily lives. The huge volume of information generated by users raises new opportunities in various applications and areas. Inferring user interests plays a significant role in providing personalized recommendations on microblogging services, and also on third-party applications providing social logins via these services, especially in cold-start situations. In this survey, we review user modeling strategies with respect to inferring user interests from previous studies. To this end, we focus on four dimensions of inferring user interest profiles: (1) data collection, (2) representation of user interest profiles, (3) construction and enhancement of user interest profiles, and (4) the evaluation of the constructed profiles. Through this survey, we aim to provide an overview of state-of-the-art user modeling strategies for inferring user interest profiles on microblogging social networks with respect to the four dimensions. For each dimension, we review and summarize previous studies based on specified criteria. Finally, we discuss some challenges and opportunities for future work in this research domain.     

Measuring the spreadability of users in microblogs

Message forwarding (e.g.,retweeting on Twitter.com) is one of the most popular functions in many existing microblogs,and a large number of users participate in the propagation of information,for any given messages.While this large number can generate notable diversity and not all users have the same ability to diffuse the messages,this also makes it challenging to find the true users with higher spreadability,those generally rated as interesting and authoritative to diffuse the messages.In this paper,a novel method called SpreadRank is proposed to measure the spreadability of users in microblogs,considering both the time interval of retweets and the location of users in information cascades.Experiments were conducted on a real dataset from Twitter containing about 0.26 million users and 10 million tweets,and the results showed that our method is consistently better than the PageRank method with the network of retweets and the method of retweetNum which measures the spreadability according to the number of retweets.Moreover,we find that a user with more tweets or followers does not always have stronger spreadability in microblogs.     

Professional or interactive: CEOs’ image strategies in the microblogging context

Microblogging platforms are gaining popularity among corporations and their top management in recent years. Although microblogging services like Twitter and Sina Weibo are now prevalently used for managing CEOs’ images and public relations, few studies have examined the effects of these practices on the loyalty of target audiences. This study examined the effect of CEO image strategy on follower loyalty in the microblogging context. Based on the self-presentation theory, four types of CEO image strategies were identified, namely the Expert, Friend, Textbook, and Daybook strategies. These categories were identified based on the levels of interactivity and professionalism of the CEOs on their microblogs. An online survey was used to collect data from microblog users, that is, the CEOs’ followers. The results showed that CEO image strategy influences follower loyalty in the microblogging context and that Chinese microblog users are fondest of CEOs who present themselves as experts rather than as friends (H1). The results also showed that usage orientation moderates the effect of CEO image on follower loyalty (H2) and that goal orientation positively influences CEOs with a highly professional image.     

基于地理近邻关系的微博系统朋友推荐

近年来,微博的蓬勃发展吸引了大量网络用户,用户所发海量微博呈现的大数据环境成为理解用户行为的重要资源。目前,大量在线朋友推荐研究通过对微博内容分析推断用户的兴趣和喜好以进行朋友推荐,但大多数已有研究忽略了用户位置和兴趣之间的潜在关系。事实上,多数情况下用户真正感兴趣的还是他周围的人。为此,提出了基于地理近邻关系的朋友推荐方法,通过把所处位置周围兴趣爱好相似的微博用户彼此推荐,为用户提供了与周围可能感兴趣的人联系的独特渠道。仿真分析证明,与传统朋友推荐方法相比,基于地理近邻的朋友推荐具有较高的推荐性能。