Modeling and predicting personal information dissemination behavior

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we propose a new way to automatically model and predict human behavior of receiving and disseminating information by analyzing the contact and content of personal communications. A personal profile, called CommunityNet, is established for each individual based on a novel algorithm incorporating contact, content, and time information simultaneously. It can be used for personal social capital management. Clusters of CommunityNets provide a view of informal networks for organization management. Our new algorithm is developed based on the combination of dynamic algorithms in the social network field and the semantic content classification methods in the natural language processing and machine learning literatures. We tested CommunityNets on the Enron Email corpus and report experimental results including filtering, prediction, and recommendation capabilities. We show that the personal behavior and intention are somewhat predictable based on these models. For instance, "to whom a person is going to send a specific email" can be predicted by one's personal social network and content analysis. Experimental results show the prediction accuracy of the proposed adaptive algorithm is 58% better than the social network-based predictions, and is 75% better than an aggregated model based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation with social network enhancement. Two online demo systems we developed that allow interactive exploration of CommunityNet are also discussed.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.6 Learning

General Terms:
Algorithms, Experimentation

Keywords:
information dissemination, personal information management, user behavior modeling