Topics and Influential User Identification in Twitter using Twitter Lists

摘要

Twitter, as one of the most popular social network services, draws the attention of more and more researchers worldwide With a large amount of information tweeted every day, it turns essential to identify the influential users we are interested in In the previous research, researchers mainly identify topics from tweets and rank users by utilizing the follow relationship- however the following relationship is strongly related to their reputation in real world and cannot describe their influence and activity level in Twitter exactly. Instead, in this paper, to identify topics and influential users, we use "Twitter List," whose name represents the topic of listed members. By analyzing Twitter List, we are able to detect topics and identify influential users in the corresponding topic more efficiently. Based on our experimental evaluation using the selected two topics, the influential users identified by our proposed method have the average influence score related to the topic made by interviewees of 3.7 and 3.33 outweigh the methods of ranking by follower numbers with the average score of 3.22 and 3.27 respectively.