CommSense: Identify Social Relationship with Phone Contacts via Mining Communications

People around the world are more connected today than ever before. By making phone calls, sending text messages and participating in online chats, mobile users are frequently interacting with their social connections through multiple communication channels. This trend is expected to continue with the emergence of immensely popular communication apps on mobile devices. Intuitively, these interactions on users' mobile phones can reveal valuable information regarding their social relationship with their phone contacts. Understanding such relationship can help provide new services and improve users' mobile experience. In this paper, we explore the opportunity to deeply understand these social relationship through mining mobile communication data. By building an on-device mining framework called Commsense, we show that automatically learning and understanding such relationship can efficiently support useful applications such as categorizing mobile contacts, identifying their relative importance, and automatically managing mobile contacts with very little human interference.