A Study on Graph-based Topic Extraction from Microblogs

Microblogs became popular information delivery ways due to the spread of smart phones. They have the characteristic of reflecting the interests of users more quickly than other medium. Particularly, in case of the subject which attracts many users, microblogs can supply rich information originated from various information sources. Nevertheless, it has been considered as a hard problem to obtain useful information from microblogs because too much noises are in them. So far, various methods are proposed to extract and track some subjects from particular documents, yet these methods do not work effectively in case of microblogs which consist of short phrases. In this paper, we propose a graph-based topic extraction and partitioning method to understand interests of users about a certain keyword. The proposed method contains the process of generating a keyword graph using the co-occurrences of terms in the microblogs, and the process of splitting the graph by using a network partitioning method. When we applied the proposed method on some keywords. our method shows good performance for finding a topic about the keyword and partitioning the topic into sub-topics.