Building Bridges into the Unknown: Personalizing Connections to Little-known Countries

TL;DR

This paper introduces a personalized recommendation system that leverages Twitter data to connect users with little-known countries, aiming to reveal hidden global connections and increase interest in obscure content.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach combining social media analysis and knowledge matching to create personalized bridges to little-known countries, validated through user studies and interviews.

Findings

Interest increase depends on pre-existing disposition.

Recency, novelty, emotiveness, and language are key properties of effective bridges.

The approach reveals hidden global connections and enhances awareness of obscure countries.

Abstract

How are you related to Malawi? Do recent events on the Comoros effect you in any subtle way? Who in your extended social network is in Croatia? We seldom ask ourselves these questions, yet a "long tail" of content beyond our everyday knowledge is waiting to be explored. In this work we propose a recommendation task of creating interest in little-known content by building personalized "bridges" to users. We consider an example task of interesting users in little-known countries, and propose a system which aggregates a user's Twitter profile, network, and tweets to create an interest model, which is then matched to a library of knowledge about the countries. We perform a user study of 69 participants and conduct 11 in-depth interviews in order to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed approach and gather qualitative insight into the effect of multi-faceted use of Twitter on the perception of the bridges. We find the increase in interest concerning little-known content to greatly depend on the pre-existing disposition to it. Additionally, we discover a set of vital properties good bridges must possess, including recency, novelty, emotiveness, and a proper selection of language. Using the proposed approach we aim to harvest the "invisible connections" to make explicit the idea of a "small world" where even a faraway country is more closely connected to you than you might have imagined.