Large-Scale Parallel Matching of Social Network Profiles
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Abstract
A profile matching algorithm takes as input a user profile of one social network and returns, if existing, the profile of the same person in another social network. Such methods have immediate applications in Internet marketing, search, security, and a number of other domains, which is why this topic saw a recent surge in popularity.
In this paper, we present a user identity resolution approach that uses minimal supervision and achieves a precision of 0.98 at a recall of 0.54. Furthermore, the method is computationally efficient and easily parallelizable. We show that the method can be used to match Facebook, the most popular social network globally, with VKontakte, the most popular social network among Russian-speaking users.
Keywords
User identify resolution Entity resolution Profile matching Record linkage Social networks Social network analysis Facebook VkontakteNotes
Acknowledgements
This research was conducted as part of a project funded by Digital Society Laboratory LLC. We thank Prof. Chris Biemann and three anonymous reviewers for their thorough comments that significantly improved quality of this paper.
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