User identification across online social networks based on gated multi-feature extraction

Abstract

User identification is an essential technical support for downstream tasks such as recommendation systems, information retrieval, and collaborative filtering. Computing the similarity between user display names through classifiers is an effective solution for user identification across social networks. However, there are two problems with existing methods. Applying expert domain knowledge to extract handcrafted features of display names ignores the semantic information, resulting in poor performance of these methods. Selecting influential display names, and handcrafted features in user identification problems are also one of the difficulties. To solve these two problems, we propose a method based on the multi-feature fusion of display names using gated units. First, we extract the deep semantic features of display names through the BERT pre-trained multi-language model. Then, the gated mechanism is applied to select the handcrafted features we extracted to retain the essential features. Then, the adaptive factors are used to fuse handcrafted features and deep features to obtain user identification results across social networks. Finally, the efficiency of our model is verified on three constructed real-world multilingual display names datasets across multiple online social networks and compared with existing state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the compared algorithms.