Unsupervised Modeling of Users' Interests from their Facebook Profiles and Activities

Abstract

User interest profiles have become essential for personalizing information streams and services, and user interfaces and experiences. In today's world, social networks such as Facebook or Twitter provide users with a powerful platform for interest expression and can, thus, act as a rich content source for automated user interest modeling. This, however, poses significant challenges because the user generated content on them consists of free unstructured text. In addition, users may not explicitly post or tweet about everything that interests them. Moreover, their interests evolve over time. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised algorithm and system that addresses these challenges. It models a broad range of an individual user's explicit and implicit interests from her social network profile and activities without any user input. We perform extensive evaluation of our system, and algorithm, with a dataset consisting of 488 active Facebook users' profiles and demonstrate that it can accurately estimate a user's interests in practice.