Abstract

Social media such as blogs, Facebook, Flickr, etc., presents data in a network format rather than classical IID distribution. To address the interdependency among data instances, relational learning has been proposed, and collective inference based on network connectivity is adopted for prediction. However, the connections in social media are often multi-dimensional. An actor can connect to another actor due to different factors, e.g., alumni, colleagues, living in the same city or sharing similar interest, etc. Collective inference normally does not differentiate these connections. In this work, we propose to extract latent social dimensions based on network information first, and then utilize them as features for discriminative learning. These social dimensions describe different affiliations of social actors hidden in the network, and the subsequent discriminative learning can automatically determine which affiliations are better aligned with the class labels. Such a scheme is preferred when multiple diverse relations are associated with the same network. We conduct extensive experiments on social media data (one from a real-world blog site and the other from a popular content sharing site). Our model outperforms representative relational learning methods based on collective inference, especially when few labeled data are available. The sensitivity of this model and its connection to existing methods are also carefully examined.

Citations