Title: Tagging users based on Twitter lists

Authors: Yuto Yamaguchi; Toshiyuki Amagasa; Hiroyuki Kitagawa

Addresses: Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8573, Japan; Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, 5-3-1 Kojimachi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-0083, Japan. ' Faculty of Engineering, Information and Systems, University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8573, Japan; Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, 3-1-1 Yoshinodai, Chuo-ku, Sagamihara, Kanagawa 252-5210, Japan. ' Faculty of Engineering, Information and Systems, University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8573, Japan

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of tagging users in Twitter, one of the most popular microblogs. Although there are an enormous number of Twitter users, some are particularly influential regarding certain topics (e.g., politics, sports). These users often transmit useful information about their topics. For example, a user familiar with political issues often transmits useful information about the latest political news. To obtain useful information, therefore, it is very important to know these user topics. To discover user topics, we propose a user tagging method using Twitter lists, the official Twitter function for making and sharing user lists. From our observations, users included in the same list were likely to have posted on the same topic. This topic was often described by the list name. For example, the list named 'politicians-list' has politicians as its members. For this reason, our proposed method regards list names as sequences of tags and assigns them to list members. Experiments conducted using two datasets showed that our proposed method works effectively in the user profiling domain and the user ranking domain.

Keywords: microblogs; user tagging; Twitter lists; user topics; user profiling; user ranking.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWET.2012.048526

International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, 2012 Vol.7 No.3, pp.273 - 298

Published online: 16 Aug 2014 *

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