Locate Who You Are: Matching Geo-location to Text for User Identity Linkage

Abstract

Nowadays, users are encouraged to activate across multiple online social networks simultaneously. User identity linkage, which aims to reveal the correspondence among different accounts across networks, has been regarded as a fundamental problem for user profiling, marketing, cybersecurity, and recommendation. Existing methods mainly address the prediction problem by utilizing profile, content, or structural features of users in symmetric ways. However, encouraged by online services, information from different social platforms may also be asymmetric, such as geo-locations and texts. It leads to an emerged challenge in aligning users with asymmetric information across networks. Instead of similarity evaluation applied in previous works, we formalize correlation between geo-locations and texts and propose a novel user identity linkage framework for matching users across networks. Moreover, our model can alleviate the label scarcity problem by introducing external text-location pairs. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that our approach outperforms existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art results.