Analysis of user keyword similarity in online social networks

Abstract

How do two people become friends? What role does homophily play in bringing two people closer to help them forge friendship? Is the similarity between two friends different from the similarity between any two people? How does the similarity between a friend of a friend compare to similarity between direct friends? In this work, our goal is to answer these questions. We study the relationship between semantic similarity of user profile entries and the social network topology. A user profile in an on-line social network is characterized by its profile entries. The entries are termed as user keywords. We develop a model to relate keywords based on their semantic relationship and define similarity functions to quantify the similarity between a pair of users. First, we present a ‘forest model’ to categorize keywords across multiple categorization trees and define the notion of distance between keywords. Second, we use the keyword distance to define similarity functions between a pair of users. Third, we analyze a set of Facebook data according to the model to determine the effect of homophily in on-line social networks. Based on our evaluations, we conclude that direct friends are more similar than any other user pair. However, the more striking observation is that except for direct friends, similarities between users are approximately equal, irrespective of the topological distance between them.