A multiview approach based on naming behavioral modeling for aligning chinese user accounts across multiple networks

Abstract

Hundreds of millions of Chinese people have become social network users in recent years, and aligning the accounts of common Chinese users across multiple social networks is valuable to many inter-network applications, for example, cross-network recommendation and cross-network link prediction. Many methods have explored the proper ways of utilizing account name information into aligning the common English users' accounts. However, how to properly utilize the account name information when aligning the Chinese user accounts remains to be detailedly studied. In this article, we first discuss the available naming behavioral models as well as the related features for different types of Chinese account name matchings. Second, we propose the framework of Multi-View Cross-Network User Alignment (MCUA) method, which uses a multi-view framework to creatively integrate different models to deal with different types of Chinese account name matchings, and can consider all of the studied features when aligning the Chinese user accounts. Finally, we conduct experiments to prove that MCUA can outperform many existing methods on aligning Chinese user accounts between Sina Weibo and Twitter. Besides, we also study the best learning models and the top-k valuable features of different types of name matchings for MCUA over our experimental datasets. K E Y W O R D S account name, aligning Chinese user accounts, multiview framework, multiple social networks 1 INTRODUCTION Online social networks are highly developed in recent years, 1 and hundreds of millions of Chinese people have become social network users. * Different social networks may provide different services, so it is natural for individuals to use multiple social networks for different purposes at the same time. 2 For example, a Chinese student may use Renren † to share funny photos with his classmates, use Sina Weibo ‡ to follow the latest events, and use Twitter § to connect with international friends. However, the accounts owned by the same user in different social sites are mostly isolated without any correspondence connections to each other. 3 Aligning the accounts of common users across different social networks is of great value to many concrete real-world internetwork applications. 3-6 For example, we can recommend new friends or new topics to a new Twitter user according to the social relationship information * Calculated by China Internet Network Information Center(CNNIC), the Statistics Report on China Internet Developing Situation(2015).