Topic-based social influence measurement for social networks

Abstract

Social science studies have acknowledged that the social influence of individuals is not identical. Social networks structure and shared text can reveal immense information about users, their interests, and topic-based influence. Although some studies have considered measuring user influence, less has been on measuring and estimating topic-based user influence. In this paper, we propose an approach that incorporates network structure, user-generated content for topic-based influence measurement, and user's interactions in the network. We perform experimental analysis on Twitter data and show that our proposed approach can effectively measure topic-based user influence.