Modeling user interest in social media using news media and wikipedia

Abstract

Social media has become an important source of information and a medium for following and spreading trends, news, and ideas all over the world. Although determining the subjects of individual posts is important to extract users' interests from social media, this task is nontrivial because posts are highly contextualized and informal and have limited length. To address this problem, we propose a user modeling framework that maps the content of texts in social media to relevant categories in news media. In our framework, the semantic gaps between social media and news media are reduced by using Wikipedia as an external knowledge base. We map term-based features from a short text and a news category into Wikipedia-based features such as Wikipedia categories and article entities. A user's microposts are thus represented in a rich feature space of words. Experimental results show that our proposed method using Wikipedia-based features outperforms other existing methods of identifying users' interests from social media.