Social-Relational Topic Model for Social Networks
Weiyu Guo, Shu Lei Wu, Liang Wang, Tieniu Tan · 2015
Social networking services, such as Twitter and Sina Weibo, have tremendous popularity in recent years. Mass of short texts and social links are aggregated into these service platforms. To realize personalized services on social network, topic inference from both short texts and social links plays more and more important role. Most conventional topic modeling methods focus on analyzing formal texts, e.g., papers, news and blogs, and usually assume that the links are only generated by topical factors. As a result, on social network, the learned topics of these methods are usually affected by topic-irrelevant links. Recently, a few approaches use artificial priors to recognize the links generated by the popularity factor in topic modeling. However, employing global priors, these methods can not well capture the distinct properties of each link and still suffer from the effect of topic-irrelevant links. To address the above limitations, we propose a novel Social-Relational Topic Model (SRTM), which can alleviate the effect of topic-irrelevant links by analyzing relational users' topics of each link. SRTM jointly models texts and social links for learning the topic distribution and topical influence of each user. The experimental results show that, our model outperforms the state-of-the-arts in topic modeling and social link prediction.