NeXLink: Node Embedding Framework for Cross-Network Linkages Across Social Networks

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Users create accounts on multiple social networks to get connected to their friends across these networks. We refer to these user accounts as user identities. Since users join multiple social networks, therefore, there will be cases where a pair of user identities across two different social networks belong to the same individual. We refer to such pairs as Cross-Network Linkages (CNLs). In this work, we model the social network as a graph to explore the question, whether we can obtain effective social network graph representation such that node embeddings of users belonging to CNLs are closer in embedding space than other nodes, using only the network information. To this end, we propose a modular and flexible node embedding framework, referred to as NeXLink, which comprises of three steps. First, we obtain local node embeddings by preserving the local structure of nodes within the same social network. Second, we learn the global node embeddings by preserving the global structure, which is present in the form of common friendship exhibited by nodes involved in CNLs across social networks. Third, we combine the local and global node embeddings, which preserve local and global structures to facilitate the detection of CNLs across social networks. We evaluate our proposed framework on an augmented (synthetically generated) dataset of 63,713 nodes & 817,090 edges and real-world dataset of 3338 Twitter-Foursquare node pairs. Our approach achieves an average Hit@1 rate of 98% for detecting CNLs across social networks and significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.