User context as a source of topic retrieval in Twitter

Context in a web-based social system can be a valuable source of user information. On Twitter, context can be derived from user interactions, content streams and friendship. In this paper we focus on extracting user context by means of conversation patterns and user-generated twitter lists. We present a novel approach which utilizes just the context to extract twitter users’ topics of interest. Our approach achieved a precision of 84% indicating that user context can be exploited for topic information.