Facet-Based User Modeling in Social Media for Personalized Ranking

Abstract

Micro-blogging service has grown to a popular social media and provides a number of real-time messages for users. Although these messages allow users to access information on-the-fly, users often complain the problems of information overload and information shortage. Thus, a variety of methods of information filtering and recommendation are proposed, which are associated with user modeling. In this study, we propose an effective method of user modeling, facet-based user modeling, to capture user’s interests in social media. We evaluate our models in the context of personalized ranking of microblogs. Experiments on real-world data show that facet-based user modeling can provide significantly better ranking than traditional ranking methods. We also shed some light on how different facets impact user’s interest.