Merl

Abstract

Network embedding models aim to learn low-dimensional representations for nodes and/or edges in graphs. For social networks, learning edge representations is especially beneficial as we need to describe or explain the relationships, activities, and interactions between users. Existing approaches that learn stand-alone node embeddings, and represent edges as pairs of node embeddings, are limited in their applicability because nodes participate in multiple relationships, which should be considered. In addition, social networks often contain multiple types of edges, which yields multiview contexts that need to be considered in the representation. In this paper, we propose a new methodology, MERL, that (1) captures asymmetry in multiple views by learning well-defined edge representations that are responsive to the difference between the source and destination node roles, and (2) incorporates textual communications to identify multiple source of social signals (e.g. strength and affinity) that moderate the impact of different views between users. Our experiments show that MERL outperforms alternative state-of-the-art embedding models on link prediction and multilabel classification tasks across multiple views in social network datasets. We further analyze the learned embeddings of MERL and demonstrate they are more correlated with the existence of view-based edges compared to previous methods. CCS CONCEPTS • Information systems → Social networks; • Computing methodologies → Learning latent representations.