Recommending Users and Communities in Social Media

Social media has become increasingly prevalent in the last few years, not only enabling people to connect with each other by social links, but also providing platforms for people to share information and interact over diverse topics. Rich user-generated information, for example, users’ relationships and daily posts, are often available in most social media service websites. Given such information, a challenging problem is to provide reasonable user and community recommendation for a target user, and consequently, help the target user engage in the daily discussions and activities with his/her friends or like-minded people. In this article, we propose a unified framework of recommending users and communities that utilizes the information in social media. Given a user’s profile or a set of keywords as input, our framework is capable of recommending influential users and topic-cohesive interactive communities that are most relevant to the given user or keywords. With the proposed framework, users can find other individuals or communities sharing similar interests, and then have more interaction with these users or within the communities. We present a generative topic model to discover user-oriented and community-oriented topics simultaneously, which enables us to capture the exact topical interests of users, as well as the focuses of communities. Extensive experimental evaluation and case studies on a dataset collected from Twitter demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework compared with other probabilistic-topic-model-based recommendation methods.