SMPC: boosting social media popularity prediction with caption

Social media popularity prediction refers to using multi-modal content to predict the popularity of a post offered by an internet user. It is an effective way to explore advanced forecasting trends and make more popularity-sensitive strategic decisions for the future. Existing methods attempt to explore various multi-model features to solve this task, which only focus on local information, lacking global understanding for the post’s content. In this paper, we propose social media popularity prediction with caption (SMPC), a novel architecture that integrates the caption as the global representation into the existing multi-model-feature-based popularity prediction method. To make good use of the generated captions, we process them in word-level, sentence-level and length-level ways, obtaining three kinds of caption features. To incorporate caption features, we exploit seven variants of the architecture by concatenating features in all the possible manners, for the feature fusion and training different combinations for the CatBoost regression. Extensive experiments are conducted on Social Media Prediction Dataset (SMPD) and show that the proposed approaches can achieve competing results against state-of-the-art models.