User interest mining via tags and bidirectional interactions on Sina Weibo

Sina Weibo, one of the biggest social services in China, provides users with opportunities to share information and express their personal views, leading an explosive growth of information. How to recommend the right information to the proper person among massive data has received considerable critical attention in recent years. One of the main obstacles is the access to user topic interests. In this paper, we proposed an algorithm based on tags and bidirectional interactions to mine user topic interests on Sina Weibo. The algorithm, formulated by user interaction graph, fully takes advantage of the discordance between user interactions. Forward spread and back spread are thus utilized to update tag spread weights. We also quantify the impact of these two spread by tuning parameters on three sub data sets. In order to prove the superiority of the algorithm, we compare our algorithm with famous methods on Sina Weibo. The result demonstrates that our new algorithm outperforms other methods both in precision rate and recall rate, with the ability of mining user interest effectively with respect to tags and bidirectional interactions.