Mining topic-level opinion influence in microblog

Abstract

This paper proposes a Topic-Level Opinion Influence Model (TOIM) that simultaneously incorporates topic factor, user opinions and social influence in a unified probabilistic model with two stages learning processes. In the first stage, topic factor and user influence are integrated to generate users' influential relationship based on different topics; in the second stage, users' historical messages and social interaction records are leveraged by TOIM to construct their historical opinions and neighbors' opinion influence through a statistical learning process, which can be further utilized to predict users' future opinions on some specific topics. We evaluate our TOIM on a large-scaled dataset from Tencent Weibo, one of the largest microbloggings website in China. The experimental results show that TOIM can better predict users' opinion than other baseline methods.