PRISM: Profession Identification in Social Media with Personal Information and Community Structure

Abstract

User profession plays an important role in commercial services such as personalized recommendation and targeted advertising. In practice, profession information is usually unavailable due to privacy and other reasons. In this paper, we explore the task of identifying user professions according to their behaviors in social media. The task confronts the following challenges which make it non-trivial: how to incorporate heterogeneous information of user behaviors, how to effectively utilize both labeled and unlabeled data, and how to exploit community structure. To address these challenges, we present a framework of PRofession Identification in Social Media (PRISM). It takes advantages of both personal information and community structure of users in the following aspects: (1) We present a cascaded two-level classifier with heterogeneous personal features to measure the confidences of users belonging to different professions. (2) We present a multi-training process to take advantages of both labeled and unlabeled data to enhance classification performance. (3) We design a profession identification method synthetically considering the confidences from personal features and community structure. We collect a real-world dataset to conduct experiments, and experimental results demonstrate significant effectiveness of our method compared with other baseline methods.