Scalable topic-specific influence analysis on microblogs

Abstract

Social influence analysis on microblog networks, such as Twitter, has been playing a crucial role in online advertising and brand management. While most previous influence analysis schemes rely only on the links between users to find key influencers, they omit the important text content created by the users. As a result, there is no way to differentiate the social influence in different aspects of life (topics). Although a few prior works do support topic-specific influence analysis, they either separate the analysis of content from the analysis of network structure, or assume that content is the only cause of links, which is clearly an inappropriate assumption for microblog networks. To address the limitations of the previous approaches, we propose a novel Followship-LDA (FLDA) model, which integrates both content topic discovery and social influence analysis in the same generative process. This model properly captures the content-related and content-independent reasons why a user follows another in a microblog network. We demonstrate that FLDA produces results with significantly better precision than existing approaches. Furthermore, we propose a distributed Gibbs sampling algorithm for FLDA, and demonstrate that it provides excellent scalability on large clusters. Finally, we incorporate the FLDA model in a general search framework for topic-specific influencers. A user freely expresses his/her interest by typing a few keywords, the search framework will return a ranked list of key influencers that satisfy the user's interest. © 2014 ACM.