Topic-level opinion influence model (TOIM): An investigation using tencent microblogging

Text mining has been widely used in multiple types of user-generated data to infer user opinion, but its application to microblogging is difficult because text messages are short and noisy, providing limited information about user opinion. Given that microblogging users communicate with each other to form a social network, we hypothesize that user opinion is influenced by its neighbors in the network. In this paper, we infer user opinion on a topic by combining two factors: the user's historical opinion about relevant topics and opinion influence from his/her neighbors. We thus build a topic-level opinion influence model (TOIM) by integrating both topic factor and opinion influence factor into a unified probabilistic model. We evaluate our model in one of the largest microblogging sites in China, Tencent Weibo, and the experiments show that TOIM outperforms baseline methods in opinion inference accuracy. Moreover, incorporating indirect influence further improves inference recall and f1-measure. Finally, we demonstrate some useful applications of TOIM in analyzing users' behaviors in Tencent Weibo.