Learning multi-faceted representations of individuals from heterogeneous evidence using neural networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a neural network-based method to create comprehensive representations of individuals by integrating textual and social network data from social media, improving inference tasks like gender, occupation, location, and friendships.

Contribution

It presents a novel neural approach to combine diverse social media cues into unified person representations, enhancing multiple social inference tasks.

Findings

Improved accuracy in gender prediction

Enhanced location inference performance

Effective integration of textual and network data

Abstract

Inferring latent attributes of people online is an important social computing task, but requires integrating the many heterogeneous sources of information available on the web. We propose learning individual representations of people using neural nets to integrate rich linguistic and network evidence gathered from social media. The algorithm is able to combine diverse cues, such as the text a person writes, their attributes (e.g. gender, employer, education, location) and social relations to other people. We show that by integrating both textual and network evidence, these representations offer improved performance at four important tasks in social media inference on Twitter: predicting (1) gender, (2) occupation, (3) location, and (4) friendships for users. Our approach scales to large datasets and the learned representations can be used as general features in and have the potential to benefit a large number of downstream tasks including link prediction, community detection, or probabilistic reasoning over social networks.