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Detecting and tagging users’ social circles in social media

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Abstract

As a media and communication platform, microblog becomes more popular around the world. Most users follow a large number of celebrities and public medias on microblog; however, these celebrities do not necessarily follow all their fans. Such one-way relationship abounds in ego network and is displayed by the forms of users’ followees and followers, which make it difficult to identify users’ real friends who are contained in merged lists of followees and followers. The aim of this paper is to propose a general algorithm for detecting users’ real friends in social media and dividing them into different social circles automatically according to the closeness of their relationships. Then we analyze these social circles and detect social attributes of these social circles. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we build a microblog application which displays algorithm results of social circles for users and enables users to adjust proposed results according to her/his real social circles. We demonstrate that our algorithm is superior to the traditional clustering method in terms of F value and mean average precision. Furthermore, our method of tagging social attributes of social circles gets high performance by NDCG (normalized discounted cumulative gain).

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Notes

  1. Weibo Group Picture: http://jitizhao.sinaapp.com/.

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Ting Liu & Hailong Qin

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  1. Ting Liu
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  2. Hailong Qin
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Correspondence to Ting Liu.

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Liu, T., Qin, H. Detecting and tagging users’ social circles in social media. Multimedia Systems 22, 423–431 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-014-0435-4

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