Combining Topic Models and Social Networks for Chat Data Mining

Informal chat-room conversations have intrinsically different properties from regular static document collections. Noise, concise expressions and dynamic, changing and interleaving nature of discussions make chat data ill-suited for analysis with an off-the-shelf text mining method. On the other hand, interactive human communication has some implicit features which may be used to enhance the results. In our research we infer social network structures from the chat data by using a few basic heuristics. We then present some preliminary results showing that the inferred social graph may be used to enhance topic identification of a chat room when combined with a state-of-the-art topic and classification models. For validation purposes we then compare the performance effects of using this social information in a topic classification task.