Hot Topic Community Discovery on Cross Social Networks

Abstract

The rapid development of online social networks has allowed users to obtain information, communicate with each other and express different opinions. Generally, in the same social network, users tend to be influenced by each other and have similar views. However, on another social network, users may have opposite views on the same event. Therefore, research undertaken on a single social network is unable to meet the needs of research on hot topic community discovery. “Cross social network” refers to multiple social networks. The integration of information from multiple social network platforms forms a new unified dataset. In the dataset, information from different platforms for the same event may contain similar or unique topics. This paper proposes a hot topic discovery method on cross social networks. Firstly, text data from different social networks are fused to build a unified model. Then, we obtain latent topic distributions from the unified model using the Labeled Biterm Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LB-LDA) model. Based on the distributions, similar topics are clustered to form several topic communities. Finally, we choose hot topic communities based on their scores. Experiment result on data from three social networks prove that our model is effective and has certain application value.