From Social User Activities to People Affiliation

This study addresses the problem of inferring users\´ employment affiliation information from social activities. It is motivated by the applications which need to monitoring and analyzing the social activities of the employees from a given company, especially their social tracks related to the work and business. It definitely helps to better understand their needs and opinions towards certain business area, so that the account sales targeting these customers in the given company can adjust the sales strategies accordingly. Specifically, in this task we are given a snapshot of a social network and some labeled social users who are the employees of a given company. Our goal is to identify more users from the same company. We formulate this problem as a task of classifying nodes over a graph, and develop a Supervised Label Propagation model. It naturally incorporates the rich set of features for social activities, models the networking effect by label propagation, and learns the feature weights so that the labels are propagated to the right users. To validate its effectiveness, we show our case studies on identifying the employees of "China Telecom" and "China Unicom" from Sina Weibo. The experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms the compared baseline ones.