Topic hierarchy construction for the organization of multi-source user generated contents

Abstract

User generated contents (UGCs) carry a huge amount of high quality information. However, the information overload and diversity of UGC sources limit their potential uses. In this research, we propose a framework to organize information from multiple UGC sources by a topic hierarchy which is automatically generated and updated using the UGCs. We explore the unique characteristics of UGCs like blogs, cQAs, microblogs, etc., and introduce a novel scheme to combine them. We also propose a graph-based method to enable incremental update of the generated topic hierarchy. Using the hierarchy, users can easily obtain a comprehensive, in-depth and up-to-date picture of their topics of interests. The experiment results demonstrate how information from multiple heterogeneous sources improves the resultant topic hierarchies. It also shows that the proposed method achieves better F1 scores in hierarchy generation as compared to the state-of-the-art methods.