Automatic Identification of Teachers in Social Media using Positive Unlabeled Learning

With the emergence of online social media platforms, there has been a surge of teachers/educators turning to these platforms for professional purposes, e.g., supplementing their students’ educational needs. Consequently, teachers in social media have been the subject of many educational studies. Despite the progress in this line of research, one of the major obstacles is the limited number of teachers being investigated. Current studies usually suffice to at most a few hundreds of surveyed teachers while there are thousands of other teachers online. To better understand teachers in online social media and enable modern machine learning approaches to process teacher-related data, we need to identify more teachers. Thus, this paper proposes a framework to automatically identify teachers on Pinterest– an image-based social media platform popular among teachers. We formulate the teacher identification problem as a positive unlabeled learning task where positive samples are a small set of surveyed teachers, and unlabeled samples are their connected users on Pinterest. We perform extensive experiments on a real dataset of teachers on Pinterest and show the effectiveness of our framework. We believe the proposed framework can potentially improve the quality of many research endeavors concerned with studying teachers in social media.