A Unified Model for Topics, Events and Users on Twitter

Abstract

With the rapid growth of social media, Twitter has become one of the most widely adopted platforms for people to post short and instant message. On the one hand, people tweets about their daily lives, and on the other hand, when major events happen, people also fol-low and tweet about them. Moreover, people’s posting behaviors on events are often closely tied to their personal interests. In this paper, we try to model topics, events and users on Twitter in a unified way. We propose a model which combines an LDA-like topic model and the Recurrent Chinese Restaurant Process to capture topics and events. We further propose a duration-based regularization component to find bursty events. We also propose to use event-topic affinity vectors to model the asso-ciation between events and topics. Our exper-iments shows that our model can accurately identify meaningful events and the event-topic affinity vectors are effective for event recom-mendation and grouping events by topics. 1