User Identification Based on Integrating Multiple User Information across Online Social Networks

Abstract

User identification can help us build more comprehensive user information. It has been attracting much attention from academia. Most of the existing works are profile-based user identification and relationship-based user identification. Due to user privacy settings and social network restrictions on user data crawl, user data may be missing or incomplete in real social networks. User data include profiles, user-generated contents (UGCs), and relationships. The features extracted in previous research may be sparse. In order to reduce the impact of the above problems on user identification, we propose a multiple user information user identification framework (MUIUI). Firstly, we develop multiprocess crawlers to obtain the user data from two popular social networks, Twitter and Facebook. Secondly, we use named entity recognition and entity linking to obtain and integrate locations and organizations from profiles and UGCs. We also extract URLs from profiles and UGCs. We apply the locations jointly with the relationships and develop several algorithms to measure the similarity of the display name, all locations, all organizations, location in profile, all URLs, following organizations, and user ID, respectively. Afterward, we propose a fusion classifier machine learning-based user identification method. The results show that the F1 score of MUIUI reaches 86.46% on the dataset. It proves that MUIUI can reduce the impact of user data that are missing or incomplete.