Inferring Your Expertise from Twitter: Integrating Sentiment and Topic Relatedness

The ability to understand the expertise of users in Social Networking Sites (SNSs) is a key component for delivering effective information services such as talent seeking and user recommendation. However, users are often unwilling to make the effort to explicitly provide this information, so existing methods aimed at user expertise discovery in SNSs primarily rely on implicit inference. This work aims to infer a user's expertise based on their posts on the popular micro-blogging site Twitter. The work proposes a sentiment-weighted and topic relation-regularized learning model to address this problem. It first uses the sentiment intensity of a tweet to evaluate its importance in inferring a user's expertise. The intuition is that if a person can forcefully and subjectively express their opinion on a topic, it is more likely that the person has strong knowledge of that topic. Secondly, the relatedness between expertise topics is exploited to model the inference problem. The experiments reported in this paper were conducted on a large-scale dataset with over 10,000 Twitter users and 149 expertise topics. The results demonstrate the success of our proposed approach in user expertise inference and show that the proposed approach outperforms several alternative methods.