Multi-Attribute Topic Feature Construction for Social Media-based Prediction

Alex Morales, Nupoor Gandhi, Man-pui Sally Chan, Sophie Lohmann, Travis Sanchez, Kathleen A. Brady, Lyle Ungar, Dolores Albarracin, ChengXiang Zhai

Abstract: The effectiveness of social media-based prediction highly depends on whether we can construct effective content-based features based on social media text data. Features constructed based on topics learned using a topic model are very attractive due to their expressiveness in semantic representation and accommodation of inexact matching of semantically related words. We develop a novel general framework for constructing multi-attribute topic features using multi-views of the text data defined according to metadata attributes and study their effectiveness for a text-based prediction task. Furthermore we propose and study multiple weighting strategies to align text-based features and prediction outcomes. We evaluate the proposed method on a Twitter corpus of over 100 million tweets collected over a seven year period in 2009-2015 to predict human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) new diagnosis and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) new diagnosis in the United States at the zipcode-level and county-level resolutions. The results show that feature representations based on attributes such as authors, locations, and hashtags are generally more effective than the conventional topic feature representation.