Hubness-aware User Identity Linkage

Abstract

Nowadays, it is common for one natural person to join multiple social networks to enjoy different types of services. User identity linkage (UIL), which aims to link identical identities across different social platforms, has attracted increasing research interests recently. Most existing approaches focus on the sophisticated architecture engineering of the linkage model but ignore the challenge of hubness in the post-processing nearest neighbor search phase. Hubness appears as some identities in a social platform, called hubs, being extra-ordinary close to the identities in the other platform, which will degrade the alignment performance. Different from existing heuristic methods, in this paper we propose a hubness-aware user identity linkage model HAUIL to smoothly learn hubless linkage signals. A carefully-designed objective function is presented to explicitly mitigate the hubness information from the pre-learned linkage guidance. HAUIL can be easily adapted to most existing UIL models. Empirically, we evaluate HAUIL over multiple publicly available datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate its superiority.