Modeling Topics and Behavior of Microbloggers

Microblogging encompasses both user-generated content and behavior. When modeling microblogging data, one has to consider personal and background topics, as well as how these topics generate the observed content and behavior. In this article, we propose the Generalized Behavior-Topic (GBT) model for simultaneously modeling background topics and users’ topical interest in microblogging data. GBT considers multiple topical communities (or realms) with different background topical interests while learning the personal topics of each user and the user’s dependence on realms to generate both content and behavior. This differentiates GBT from other previous works that consider either one realm only or content data only. By associating user behavior with the latent background and personal topics, GBT helps to model user behavior by the two types of topics. GBT also distinguishes itself from other earlier works by modeling multiple types of behavior together. Our experiments on two Twitter datasets show that GBT can effectively mine the representative topics for each realm. We also demonstrate that GBT significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art models in modeling content topics and user profiling.