Tackling Sparsity, the Achilles Heel of Social Networks: Language Model Smoothing via Social Regularization

Online social networks nowadays have the worldwide prosperity, as they have revolutionized the way for people to discover, to share, and to diffuse information. Social networks are powerful, yet they still have Achilles Heel: extreme data sparsity. Individual posting documents, (e.g., a microblog less than 140 characters), seem to be too sparse to make a difference under various scenarios, while in fact they are quite different. We propose to tackle this specific weakness of social networks by smoothing the posting document language model based on social regularization. We formulate an optimization framework with a social regularizer. Experimental results on the Twitter dataset validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed model.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Rui Yan, Xiang Li, Mengwen Liu, Xiaohua Hu
• Keywords: ACL 2015, Computational Linguistics