Semantic and Influence aware k-Representative Queries over Social Streams

Abstract: Massive volumes of data continuously generated on social platforms have become an important information source for users. A primary method to obtain fresh and valuable information from social streams is \emph{social search}. Although there have been extensive studies on social search, existing methods only focus on the \emph{relevance} of query results but ignore the \emph{representativeness}. In this paper, we propose a novel Semantic and Influence aware $k$-Representative ($k$-SIR) query for social streams based on topic modeling. Specifically, we consider that both user queries and elements are represented as vectors in the topic space. A $k$-SIR query retrieves a set of $k$ elements with the maximum \emph{representativeness} over the sliding window at query time w.r.t. the query vector. The representativeness of an element set comprises both semantic and influence scores computed by the topic model. Subsequently, we design two approximation algorithms, namely \textsc{Multi-Topic ThresholdStream} (MTTS) and \textsc{Multi-Topic ThresholdDescend} (MTTD), to process $k$-SIR queries in real-time. Both algorithms leverage the ranked lists maintained on each topic for $k$-SIR processing with theoretical guarantees. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of $k$-SIR query compared with existing methods as well as the efficiency and scalability of our proposed algorithms for $k$-SIR processing.