A Novel Recommendation Framework for Micro-Blogging Based on Information Diffusion

Abstract. Micro-blogging is increasingly extending its role from a daily chatting tool into a critical platform for individuals and organizations to seek and share real-time news updates during emergencies. However, extracting useful information from micro-blogging sites poses significant challenges due to the volume of the traffic and the presence of extensive irrelevant personal messages and spams. In this paper, we propose a novel recommendation framework to overcome this problem. By analyzing information diffusion patterns among a large set of micro-blogs who play the role of news providers, our approach selects a small subset as recommended emergency news feeds for regular users. We have evaluated our diffusion-based recommendation framework on Twitter during the early outbreak of H1N1 Flu. The preliminary results show that our method leads to more balanced and comprehensive recommendations compared to benchmark approaches