Twitter user tagging method based on burst time series

Abstract

Purpose Many Twitter users post tweets that are related to their particular interests. Users can also collect information by following other users. One approach clarifies user interests by tagging labels based on the users. A user tagging method is important to discover candidate users with similar interests. This paper aims to propose a new user tagging method using the posting time series data of the number of tweets. Design/methodology/approach Our hypothesis focuses on the relationship between a user’s interests and the posting times of tweets: as users have interests, they will post more tweets at the time when events occur compared with general times. The authors assume that hashtags are labeled tags to users and observe their occurrence counts in each timestamp. The authors extract burst timestamps using Kleinberg’s burst enumeration algorithm and estimate the burst levels. The authors manage the burst levels as term frequency in documents and calculate the score using typical methods such as cosine similarity, Naïve Bayes and term frequency (TF) in a document and inversed document frequency (IDF; TF-IDF). Findings From the sophisticated experimental evaluations, the authors demonstrate the high efficiency of the tagging method. Naïve Bayes and cosine similarity are particular suitable for the user tagging and tag score calculation tasks, respectively. Some users, whose hashtags were appropriately estimated by our methods, experienced higher the maximum value of the number of tweets than other users. Originality/value Many approaches estimate user interest based on the terms in tweets and apply such graph theory as following networks. The authors propose a new estimation method that uses the time series data of the number of tweets. The merits to estimating user interest using the time series data do not depend on language and can decrease the calculation costs compared with the above-mentioned approaches because the number of features is fewer.