Abstract. How can micro-blogging activities on Twitter be leveraged for user modeling and personalization? In this paper we investigate this question and introduce a framework for user modeling on Twitter which enriches the semantics of Twitter messages (tweets) and identifies topics and entities (e.g. persons, events, products) mentioned in tweets. We analyze how strategies for constructing hashtag-based, entity-based or topic-based user profiles benefit from semantic enrichment and explore the temporal dynamics of those profiles. We further measure and compare the performance of the user modeling strategies in context of a personalized news recommendation system. Our results reveal how semantic enrichment enhances the variety and quality of the generated user profiles. Further, we see how the different user modeling strategies impact personalization and discover that the consideration of temporal profile patterns can improve recommendation quality.

Abstract. As the most popular microblogging platform, the vast amount of content on Twitter is constantly growing so that the retrieval of relevant information (streams) is becoming more and more difficult every day. Representing the semantics of individual Twitter activities and modeling the interests of Twitter users would allow for personalization and therewith countervail the information overload. Given the variety and recency of topics people discuss on Twitter, semantic user profiles generated from Twitter posts moreover promise to be beneficial for other applications on the Social Web as well. However, automatically inferring the semantic meaning of Twitter posts is a non-trivial problem. In this paper we investigate semantic user modeling based on Twitter posts. We introduce and analyze methods for linking Twitter posts with related news articles in order to contextualize Twitter activities. We then propose and compare strategies that exploit the semantics extracted from both tweets and related news articles to represent individual Twitter activities in a semantically meaningful way. A large-scale evaluation validates the benefits of our approach and shows that our methods relate tweets to news articles with high precision and coverage, enrich the semantics of tweets clearly and have strong impact on the construction of semantic user profiles for the Social Web.

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Social Web describes a new culture of participation on the Web where more and more people actively participate in publishing and organizing Web content. As part of this culture, people leave a variety of traces when interacting with (other people via) Social Web systems. In this paper, we investigate user modeling strategies for inferring personal interest profiles from Social Web interactions. In particular, we analyze individual micro-blogging activities on Twitter. We compare different strategies for creating user profiles based on the Twitter messages a user has published and study how these profiles change over time. Moreover, we evaluate the quality of the user modeling strategies in the context of personalized recommender systems and show that those strategies which consider the temporal dynamics of the individual profiles allow for the best performance.

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Abstract. Semantic Web databases allow efficient storage and access to RDF statements. Applications are able to use expressive query languages in order to retrieve relevant metadata to perform different tasks. However, access to metadata may not be public to just any application or service. Instead, powerful and flexible mechanisms for protecting sets of RDF statements are required for many Semantic Web applications. Unfortunately, current RDF stores do not provide fine-grained protection. This paper fills this gap and presents a mechanism by which complex and expressive policies can be specified in order to protect access to metadata in multi-service environments.

Abstract. In the last few years, Twitter has become a powerful tool for publishing and discussing information. Yet, content exploration in Twitter requires substantial effort. Users often have to scan information streams by hand. In this paper, we approach this problem by means of faceted search. We propose strategies for inferring facets and facet values on Twitter by enriching the semantics of individual Twitter messages (tweets) and present different methods, including personalized and context-adaptive methods, for making faceted search on Twitter more effective. We conduct a large-scale evaluation of faceted search strategies, show significant improvements over keyword search and reveal significant benefits of those strategies that (i) further enrich the semantics of tweets by exploiting links posted in tweets, and that (ii) support users in selecting facet value pairs by adapting the faceted search interface to the specific needs and preferences of a user.