Interweaving Trend and User Modeling for Personalized News Recommendation

In this paper, we study user modeling on Twitter and investigate the interplay between personal interests and public trends. To generate semantically meaningful user profiles, we present a framework that allows us to enrich the semantics of individual Twitter messages and features user modeling as well as trend modeling strategies. These profiles can be re-used in other applications for (trend-aware) personalization. Given a large Twitter dataset, we analyze the characteristics of user and trend profiles and evaluate the quality of the profiles in the context of a personalized news recommendation system. We show that personal interests are more important for the recommendation process than public trends and that by combining both types of profiles we can further improve recommendation quality.