SocialLens: Searching and Browsing Communities by Content and Interaction

HongYun Cai, Vincent Wenchen Zheng, Penghe Chen, Fanwei Zhu, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang, Zi Huang

Abstract: Community analysis is an important task in graph mining. Most of the existing community studies are community detection, which aim to find the community membership for each user based on the user friendship links. However, membership alone, without a complete profile of what a community is and how it interacts with other communities, has limited applications. This motivates us to consider systematically profiling the communities and thereby developing useful community-level applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept of community profiling, upon which we build a SocialLens system1 to enable searching and browsing communities by content and interaction. We deploy SocialLens on two social graphs: Twitter and DBLP. We demonstrate two useful applications of SocialLens, including interactive community visualization and profile-aware community ranking.