A Semantic-Enhancement-Based Social Network User-Alignment Algorithm

Abstract

User alignment can associate multiple social network accounts of the same user. It has important research implications. However, the same user has various behaviors and friends across different social networks. This will affect the accuracy of user alignment. In this paper, we aim to improve the accuracy of user alignment by reducing the semantic gap between the same user in different social networks. Therefore, we propose a semantically enhanced social network user alignment algorithm (SENUA). The algorithm performs user alignment based on user attributes, user-generated contents (UGCs), and user check-ins. The interference of local semantic noise can be reduced by mining the user’s semantic features for these three factors. In addition, we improve the algorithm’s adaptability to noise by multi-view graph-data augmentation. Too much similarity of non-aligned users can have a large negative impact on the user-alignment effect. Therefore, we optimize the embedding vectors based on multi-headed graph attention networks and multi-view contrastive learning. This can enhance the similar semantic features of the aligned users. Experimental results show that SENUA has an average improvement of 6.27% over the baseline method at hit-precision30. This shows that semantic enhancement can effectively improve user alignment.