Generic process for extracting user profiles from social media using hierarchical knowledge bases

We present the design and application of a generic approach for semantic extraction of professional interests from social media using a hierarchical knowledge-base and spreading activation theory. By this, we can assess to which extend a user´s social media life reflects his or her professional life. Detecting named entities related to professional interests is conducted by a taxonomy of terms in a particular domain. It can be assumed that one can freely obtain such a taxonomy for many professional fields including computer science, social sciences, economics, agriculture, medicine, and so on. In our experiments, we consider the domain of computer science and extract professional interests from a user´s Twitter stream. We compare different spreading activation functions and metrics to assess the performance of the obtained results against evaluation data obtained from the professional publications of the Twitter users. Besides selected existing activation functions from the literature, we also introduce a new spreading activation function that normalizes the activation w.r.t. to the outdegree of the concepts.