Real-time, scalable, content-based Twitter users recommendation

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Subercaze, Julien^{; *} | Gravier, Christophe | Laforest, Frédérique

Affiliations: Laboratoire Hubert Curien, UMR CNRS 5516, Universite Jean Monnet, 25 rue docteur Remy Annino, F-42000, Saint-Etienne, France. E-mails: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected].

Abstract: Real-time recommendation of Twitter users based on the content of their profiles is a very challenging task. Traditional IR methods such as TF-IDF fail to handle efficiently large datasets. In this paper we present a scalable approach that allows real time recommendation of users based on their tweets. Our model builds a graph of terms, driven by the fact that users sharing similar interests will share similar terms. We show how this model can be encoded as a compact binary footprint, that allows very fast comparison and ranking, taking full advantage of modern CPU architectures. We validate our approach through an empirical evaluation against the Apache Lucene’s implementation of TF-IDF. We show that our approach is in average two hundred times faster than standard optimized implementation of TF-IDF with a precision of 58%.

Keywords: Twitter recommendation, binary footprint, large scale approach, information retrieval, real-time recommendation

DOI: 10.3233/WEB-160329

Journal: Web Intelligence, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 17-29, 2016