Personal summarization from profile networks

摘要

Personal profile information on social media like LinkedIn.com and Facebook.com is at the core of many interesting applications, such as talent recommendation and contextual advertising. However, personal profiles usually lack consistent organization confronted with the large amount of available information. Therefore, it is always a challenge for people to quickly find desired information from them. In this paper, we address the task of personal profile summarization by leveraging both textual information and social connection information in social networks from both unsupervised and supervised learning paradigms. Here, using social connection information is motivated by the intuition that people with similar academic, business or social background (e.g., comajor, co-university, and co-corporation) tend to have similar experiences and should have similar summaries. For unsupervised learning, we propose a collective ranking approach, called SocialRank, to combine textual information in an individual profile and social context information from relevant profiles in generating a personal profile summary. For supervised learning, we propose a collective factor graph model, called CoFG, to summarize personal profiles with local textual attribute functions and social connection factors. Extensive evaluation on a large dataset from LinkedIn.com demonstrates the usefulness of social connection information in personal profile summarization and the effectiveness of our proposed unsupervised and supervised learning approaches.