Topic Model Approach to Authority Identification

This a Paper reviewed for Social Media Analysis 10-802 in Fall 2012.

Citation

 author    = {Alexandre Passos and 
              Jacques Wainer and
              Aria Haghighi},
 title     = {What do you know? A topic-model approach to authority identification},
 journal   = {NIPS 2010 Workshop on Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of the Crowds},
 year      = {2010}

Online version

What do you know? A topic-model approach to authority identification

Summary

In this paper the authors present a preliminary study of basic approaches to the problem of identifying authoritative documents in a given domain using textual content and report their best performing approach using Hierarchical Topic Models [Blei et al, 2004]. Authoritative documents are ones which exhibit novel and relevant information relative to a document collection while demonstrating domain knowledge. Authors define authoritativeness identification task as a ranking problem and focus on product (book GoodReads and restaurantYelp) reviews utilizing user votes as proxy for helpfulness and authoritativeness.

Dataset Description

The authors have reported results on two datasets.

• GoodReads Data