Collaborative, Dynamic and Diversified User Profiling

In this paper, we study the problem of dynamic user profiling in the context of streams of short texts. Previous work on user profiling works with long documents, do not consider collaborative information, and do not diversify the keywords for profiling users' interests. In contrast, we address the problem by proposing a user profiling algorithm (UPA), which consists of two models: the proposed collaborative interest tracking topic model (CITM) and the proposed streaming keyword diversification model (SKDM). UPA first utilizes CITM to collaboratively track each user's and his followees' dynamic interest distributions in the context of streams of short texts, and then utilizes SKDM to obtain top-k relevant and diversified keywords to profile users' interests at a specific point in time. Experiments were conducted on a Twitter dataset and we found that UPA outperforms state-of-the-art non-dynamic and dynamic user profiling algorithms.