Democrats, republicans and starbucks afficionados

Abstract

More and more technologies are taking advantage of the explosion of social media (Web search, content recommendation services, marketing, ad targeting, etc.). This paper focuses on the problem of automatically constructing user profiles, which can significantly benefit such technologies. We describe a general and robust machine learning framework for large-scale classification of social media users according to dimensions of interest. We report encouraging experimental results on 3 tasks with different characteristics: political affiliation detection, ethnicity identification and detecting affinity for a particular business.