Incorporating LDA with LSTM for followee recommendation on Twitter network

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to facilitate the task of finding appropriate information to read about, and searching for people who are in the same field of interest. Knowing that more people keep up with new streaming information on Twitter micro-blogging service. With the immense number of micro-posts shared via the follower/followee network graph, Twitter users find themselves in front of millions of tweets, which makes the task crucial.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, a long short–term memory (LSTM) model that relies on the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) output vector for followee recommendation, the LDA model applied as a topic modeling strategy is proposed.

Findings

This study trains the model using a real-life data set extracted based on Twitter follower/followee architecture. It confirms the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed approach. The approach improves the state-of-the-art models average-LSTM and time-LSTM.

Research limitations/implications

This study improves mainly the existing followee recommendation systems. Because, unlike previous studies, it applied a non-hand-crafted method which is the LSTM neural network with LDA model for topics extraction. The main limitation of this study is the cold-start users cannot be treated, also some active fake accounts may not be detected.

Practical implications

The aim of this approach is to assist users seeking appropriate information to read about, by choosing appropriate profiles to follow.

Social implications

This approach consolidates the social relationship between users in a microblogging platform by suggesting like-minded people to each other. Thus, finding users with the same interests will be easy without spending a lot of time seeking relevant users.

Originality/value

Instead of classic recommendation models, the paper provides an efficient neural network searching method to make it easier to find appropriate users to follow. Therefore, affording an effective followee recommendation system.

Citation

Dib, B., Kalloubi, F., Nfaoui, E.H. and Boulaalam, A. (2021), "Incorporating LDA with LSTM for followee recommendation on Twitter network", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 17 No. 3, pp. 250-260. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWIS-12-2020-0079