Event-Based User Classification in Weibo Media

Abstract

Weibo media, known as the real-time microblogging services, has attracted massive attention and support from social network users. Weibo platform offers an opportunity for people to access information and changes the way people acquire and disseminate information significantly. Meanwhile, it enables people to respond to the social events in a more convenient way. Much of the information in Weibo media is related to some events. Users who post different contents, and exert different behavior or attitude may lead to different contribution to the specific event. Therefore, classifying the large amount of uncategorized social circles generated in Weibo media automatically from the perspective of events has been a promising task. Under this circumstance, in order to effectively organize and manage the huge amounts of users, thereby further managing their contents, we address the task of user classification in a more granular, event-based approach in this paper. By analyzing real data collected from Sina Weibo, we investigate the Weibo properties and utilize both content information and social network information to classify the numerous users into four primary groups: celebrities, organizations/media accounts, grassroots stars, and ordinary individuals. The experiments results show that our method identifies the user categories accurately.