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SocialRobot: a big data-driven humanoid intelligent system in social media services

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Abstract

The blooming of social media services makes them the attractive resources for publishing and seeking information (posting, reposting and searching tweets) as well as socializing and interacting with other users (following and messaging other users) in social media services. With the increasing number of users and the interacting frequency between users, tremendous user-generated contents are bursting out every day. Hence, users may face a overload of information. To address the above problem, in this paper, we present SocialRobot, a humanoid intelligent system that has been deployed in Sina Weibo. For its socialization characteristic, we naturally implement it as a virtual user in Sina Weibo. By following and interacting with SocialRobot, high-quality and user-interested content can be recommended to the users from the big social media data. And the need for searching specific information can be satisfied by chatting with the SocialRobot. A crowdsourcing evaluation shows the effective performance of the SocialRobot on resolving the information overload.

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Notes

  1. Here, the factoid question indicates the question of which the answer is a single fact, such as a location (“Where is Washington, D.C.?”), a date (“When was Thomas Edison born?”), a human name (“Who is the first man to step on the moon?”), etc. The non-factoid question can be seen as the complement of the factoid question set. According to the definition of the question type on the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), the non-factoid questions usually denote the definition (“What is the universal gravitation?”) and list (“What are 4 U.S. national parks that permit snowmobiles?”) questions, of which the solving process is more complex than the factoid questions.

  2. http://answers.yahoo.com/.

  3. http://wiki.answers.com/.

  4. http://zhidao.baidu.com/.

  5. https://www.facebook.com/.

  6. https://twitter.com/.

  7. http://weibo.com/.

  8. Here, we consider “friends” as both the user’s followers and his/her followees.

  9. http://www.ask.com.

  10. http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/projects/webclopedia/.

  11. One can use and interact with the SocialRobot by clicking the Url: http://weibo.com/u/3385392460. If one has a Sina Weibo account, he/she can directly make friends with the SocialRobot and experience its functions.

  12. The home timeline for a user represents the complete message set (microblogs, information on message box, etc.) on the user’s homepage in a specific moment.

  13. Here, we consider the opinion leaders as the users who have a large amount of followers and their posting and reposting behaviors can attract more reposting and comments by their followers and other users.

  14. For a given instance, it is identified to positive or negative with an equal probability of 0.5.

  15. In Sina Weibo, this function allows users to directly send microblogs to specific users. And it can be reminded as the direct messages.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center for Social Computing and Information Retrieval, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin City, Heilongjiang, China

    Ting Liu, Wei-Nan Zhang & Yu Zhang

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  1. Ting Liu
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  2. Wei-Nan Zhang
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  3. Yu Zhang
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Correspondence to Wei-Nan Zhang.

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Liu, T., Zhang, WN. & Zhang, Y. SocialRobot: a big data-driven humanoid intelligent system in social media services. Multimedia Systems 22, 17–27 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-014-0374-0

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