Predicting Communication Intention in Social Networks

In social networks, where users send messages to each other, the issue of what triggers communication between unrelated users arises: does communication between previously unrelated users depend on friend-of-a-friend type of relationships, common interests, or other factors? In this work, we study the problem of predicting directed communication intention between two users. Link prediction is similar to communication intention in that it uses network structure for prediction. However, these two problems exhibit fundamental differences that originate from their focus. Link prediction uses evidence to predict network structure evolution, whereas our focal point is directed communication initiation between users who are previously not structurally connected. To address this problem, we employ topological evidence in conjunction to transactional information in order to predict communication intention. It is not intuitive whether methods that work well for link prediction would work well in this case. In fact, we show in this work that network or content evidence, when considered separately, are not sufficiently accurate predictors. Our novel approach, which jointly considers local structural properties of users in a social network, in conjunction with their generated content, captures numerous interactions, direct and indirect, social and contextual, which have up to date been considered independently. We performed an empirical study to evaluate our method using an extracted network of directed @-messages sent between users of a corporate micro logging service, which resembles Twitter. We find that our method outperforms state of the art techniques for link prediction. Our findings have implications for a wide range of social web applications, such as contextual expert recommendation for Q&A, new friendship relationships creation, and targeted content delivery.