A Temporal-Topic Model for Friend Recommendations in Chinese Microblogging Systems

Due to its brief form and growing popularity, microblogging is becoming people's favorite choice for seeking information and expressing opinions. Messages received by a user mainly depend on whom the user follows. Thus, recommending users with similar interests may improve the experience quality for information receiving. Since messages posted by microblogging users reflect their interests, and the keywords in the messages indicate their main focus to a large extent, we can discover users' preferences by analyzing the user-generated contents. Moreover, users' interests are not static, on the contrary, they change as time goes by. Based on such intuitions, in this paper, we propose a temporal-topic model to analyze users' possible behaviors and predict their potential friends in microblogging. The model learns users' latent preferences by extracting keywords on aggregated messages over a period of time via a topic model, and then the impact of time is considered to deal with interest drifts. The experimental results of friend recommendations on Sina Weibo, one of the most popular microblogging sites in China, have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model.