User Identification in Online Social Networks using Graph Transformer Networks

The problem of user recognition in online social networks is driven by the need for higher security. Previous recognition systems have extensively employed content-based features and temporal patterns to identify and represent distinctive characteristics within user profiles. This work reveals that semantic textual analysis and a graph representation of the user’s social network can be utilized to develop a user identification system. A graph transformer network architecture is proposed for the closed-set node identification task, leveraging the weighted social network graph as input. Users retweeting, mentioning, or replying to a target user’s tweet are considered neighbors in the social network graph and connected to the target user. The proposed user identification system outperforms all state-of-the-art systems. Moreover, we validate its performance on three publicly available datasets.