Interest Mining from User Tweets

We build a system to extract user interests from Twitter messages. Specifically, we extract interest candidates using linguistic patterns and rank them using four different keyphrase ranking techniques: TFIDF, TextRank, LDA-TextRank, and Relevance-Interestingness-Rank (RI-Rank). We also explore the complementary relation between TFIDF and TextRank in ranking interest candidates. Top ranked interests are evaluated with user feedback gathered from an online survey. The results show that TFIDF and TextRank are both suitable for extracting user interests from tweets. Moreover, the combination of TFIDF and TextRank consistently yields the highest user positive feedback.