An Information Diffusion Based Recommendation Framework for Micro-Blogging

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, seeking and extracting useful information from micro-blogging sites poses significant challenges due to the volume of the traffic and the presence of a large body of 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 emergency news providers, our approach could select 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 evaluation results show that our method results in more balanced and comprehensive recommendations compared to benchmark approaches