Anchor User Oriented Accordant Embedding for User Identity Linkage

User Identity Linkage is to find users belonging to the same real person in different social networks. Besides, anchor users refer to matching users known in advance. However, how to match users only based on network information is still very difficult and existing embedding methods suffer from the challenge of error propagation. Error propagation means the error occurring in learning some users’ embeddings may be propagated and amplified to other users along with edges in the network. In this paper, we propose the Anchor UseR ORiented Accordant Embedding (AURORAE) method to learn the vector representation for each user in each social network by capturing useful network information and avoiding error propagation. Specifically, AURORAE learns the potential relations between anchor users and all users, which means each user is directly connected to all anchor users and the error cannot be propagated without paths. Then, AURORAE captures the useful local structure information into final embeddings under the constraint of accordant vector representations between anchor users. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.