Extracting Communities of Interests for Semantics-Based Graph Searches

Users recently find their interests by checking the contents published or mentioned by their immediate neighbors in social networking services. We propose semantics-based link navigation; links guide the active user to potential neighbors who may provide new interests. Our method first creates a graph that has users as nodes and shared interests as links. Then it divides the graph by link pruning to extract practical numbers, that the active user can navigate, of interest-sharing groups, i.e. communities of interests (COIs). It then attaches a different semantic tag to the link to each representative user, which best reflects the interests of COIs that they are included in, and to the link to each immediate neighbor of the active user. It finally calculates link attractiveness by analyzing the semantic tags on links. The active user can select the link to access by checking the semantic tags and link attractiveness. User interests extracted from large scale actual blog-entries are used to confirm the efficiency of our proposal. Results show that navigation based on link attractiveness and representative users allows the user to find new interests much more accurately than is otherwise possible.