Hierarchical dirichlet processes with social influence

Abstract

The hierarchical Dirichlet process model has been successfully used for extracting the topical or semantic content of documents and other kinds of sparse count data. Along with the growth of social media, there have been simultaneous increases in the amounts of textual information and social structural information. To incorporate the information contained in these structures, in this paper, we propose a novel non-parametric model, social hierarchical Dirichlet process (sHDP), to solve the problem. We assume that the topic distributions of documents are similar to each other if their authors have relations in social networks. The proposed method is extended from the hierarchical Dirichlet process model. We evaluate the utility of our method by applying it to three data sets: papers from NIPS proceedings, a subset of articles from Cora, and microblogs with social network. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods in all three data sets.