Who is the Barbecue King of Texas?: A Geo-Spatial Approach to Finding Local Experts on Twitter Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • This paper addresses the problem of identifying local experts in social media systems like Twitter. Local experts - in contrast to general topic experts - have specialized knowledge focused around a particular location, and are important for many applications including answering local information needs and interacting with community experts. And yet identifying these experts is difficult. Hence in this paper, we propose a geo-spatial-driven approach for identifying local experts that leverages the fine-grained GPS coordinates of millions of Twitter users. We propose a local expertise framework that integrates both users' topical expertise and their local authority. Concretely, we estimate a user's local authority via a novel spatial proximity expertise approach that leverages over 15 million geotagged Twitter lists. We estimate a user's topical expertise based on expertise propagation over 600 million geo-tagged social connections on Twitter. We evaluate the proposed approach across 56 queries coupled with over 11,000 individual judgments from Amazon Mechanical Turk. We find significant improvement over both general (non-local) expert approaches and comparable local expert finding approaches. Copyright 2014 ACM.

name of conference

  • Proceedings of the 37th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research & development in information retrieval

published proceedings

  • SIGIR'14: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 37TH INTERNATIONAL ACM SIGIR CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

author list (cited authors)

  • Cheng, Z., Caverlee, J., Barthwal, H., & Bachani, V.

citation count

  • 39

complete list of authors

  • Cheng, Zhiyuan||Caverlee, James||Barthwal, Himanshu||Bachani, Vandana

editor list (cited editors)

  • Geva, S., Trotman, A., Bruza, P., Clarke, C., & Järvelin, K.

publication date

  • July 2014