Evolving Social Media Background Representation with Frequency Weights and Co-Occurrence Graphs

Abstract

Social media as a background information source has been utilized in many practical computational tasks, such as stock price prediction, epidemic tracking, and product recommendation. However, proper representation of an evolving social media background is still in an early research stage. In this article, we propose a representation method that considers temporal novelties as well as the fine details of word inter-dependencies. Our method is based on the tf-idf and graph embedding techniques. The proposed method has superiority over other representation methods because it takes the advantage of both the temporal aspect of tf-idf and the semantic aspect of graph embeddings. We compare our method with a variety of baselines in two practical application scenarios using real-world data. In tweet popularity prediction, our representation achieves 5.7% less error and 12.8% higher correlation compared to the best baseline. In e-commerce product recommendation, our representation achieves 17% higher hit-rate and 20% higher NDCG compared to the best baseline.