Automatic extraction of persistent topics from social text streams

Abstract

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.