Identifying Topic-Specific Experts on Microblog

Abstract

With the rapid growth of microblog, expert identification on microblog has been playing a crucial role in many applications. While most previous expert identification studies only assess global authoritativeness of a user, there is no way to differentiate the authoritativeness in a particular aspect of topics. In this paper, we propose a novel model, which jointly models text and following relationship in the same generative process. Furthermore, we integrate a similarity-based weight scheme into the model to address the popular bias problem, and use followee topic distribution as prior information to make user's topic distribution more precisely. Our empirical study on two large real-world datasets shows that our proposed model produces significantly higher quality results than the prior arts.

1. Introduction

Microblog, such as Twitter, Sina Weibo, has become tremendously popular over the recent years. On microblog, a user follows another user, known as followee, creating an explicit following relationship. Through a formed social network which consists of users and their following relations, a user can easily broadcast a short text, known as tweet, to all of his/her followers and also automatically receive tweets from his/her followees. The rich information in microblog has become a popular resource for identifying the experts, which can be useful for many applications [1,2], such as viral marketing, searching, expertise recommendation, information propagation, social customer relationship management etc.

A lot of studies have been done on expert identification in the context of social network. However, most of these studies, such as typical PageRank [3], only infer global authoritativeness of each user, without assessing the authoritativeness in an aspect of topics. Clearly, each user has unique topical interest and no one is an expert on every topic. Topic-specific expert analysis provides a more detailed authoritativeness portfolio for a user, which is critical for many applications [1,2].

A few studies have been conducted to identify topic-specific experts. In general, the existing studies on topic-specific expert identification can be categorized into two camps [2]. The first camp, represented by TSPR [4] and TwitterRank [5], is PageRank-based methods. The second camp, such as Link-LDA [6] and FLDA [2], is LDA-based methods. PageRank-based methods, which extend PageRank for topical authority analysis, require the topics to be already created either manually or by a topic modeling preprocess. As the content and links are related to each other, the separation between the analysis on content and the analysis on the network structure usually leads to inferior performance, compared to LDA-based methods, which can detect topics and infer experts at the same time [2]. LDA-based methods extend Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) [7], which is a popular unsupervised technique for topic discovery in large document collections. Although the LDA-based methods achieve relatively good results in topic-specific expert identification, there still exist several weaknesses that need to be addressed. First of all, some popular users on microblog are followed by many users just for their popularity. For example, President Obama has a massive number of followers in Twitter, but some of them are not interested in politics at all. These popular users produce a very noisy result in LDA-based model, because they repeatedly appear in almost every topic group. This phenomenon, which is called popular bias, makes the interpretability of topics undesirable. In the document corpus analysis, the popular users correspond to the frequent words, such as the, and, of, which occur in most of the documents. These frequent words do not contribute to the topic formation and also produce a very noisy result. In practice, these frequent words are manually removed before analysis according to a corpus-specific stop word list. Unfortunately, these popular users on microblog are very important to include in the analysis. Although FLDA introduces additional path-labeling process to address the popular bias problem, a followee from the popularity path is ignored and not assigned with a topic. Secondly, LDA-based models miss the impact of user's followees in the generation of users' tweet and following relationship. Actually, users are strongly influenced by their followees on microblog. Users' followees play important roles in users' generated tweet and following relation. Therefore, the challenge of identifying topic-specific experts on microblog has yet to be studied thoroughly.

In this paper, we mainly focus on topic-specific expert identification on microblog. To address the limitations of previous approaches, we propose a novel model, which can detect topics and infer experts in the same generative process. Moreover, we address the popular bias problem by incorporating a similarity-based weight scheme into the model, and use followee topic distribution as prior information to make user's topic distribution more precisely. At last, with the inferred parameters, a search framework is introduced to produce an ordered list of topic-specific experts by their authoritativeness degree that satisfies the user's query intent.

In summary, we make the following contributions in this paper:

● We propose a new model to jointly model both tweet and following relation at the same time. Furthermore, a weight scheme is provided and the followee topic distribution is used to make user's topic distribution more precisely.

● We propose a search framework to identify topic-specific experts according to the user’s query.

● Through experiments on two large real-world microblog datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we describe the related work. Before the details of our proposed model, we briefly review LDA model and Link-LDA model in Section 3. Section 4 introduces our model. In Section 5, we present the experimental results. Finally, we conclude the paper in Section 6.

 

2. Related Work

Much work has been done on expert identification in the context of social network and web structure analysis. In particular, some traditional centrality measures, which are based on the structure of social network, have been used. That is the case of Closeness and Betweenness [8,9]. Closeness centrality is based on the length of the shortest paths from a node to everyone else. Betweenness centrality considers for each node all the shortest paths that should pass through this node to connect all other nodes in the network. PageRank [3] is a well-known algorithm used to measure both the relevance and presence of websites on the Internet, which is a variation of classic centrality measure known as eigenvector. An alternative algorithm to PageRank is HITS [10]. PageRank and HITS have been used repeatedly in the context of Twitter [11-14]. However, most of these studies only assess global authoritativeness of each user, without inferring the authoritativeness in a particular aspect of topics. In practice, topic-specific expert analysis is more effective and functional than global expert analysis for some applications.

A few studies have been conducted to identify topic-specific experts in the context of structure analysis of the web graph and social networks. In general, there are two camps on topic-specific expert identification. The first camp, represented by Topic-Sensitive PageRank (TSPR) [4] and TwitterRank [5], is PageRank-based methods. The second camp, such as Link-LDA [6] and FLDA [2], is LDA-based methods.

Given the popularity of PageRank, it is natural to extend it for topical expert analysis. TSPR is such an extension that computes per-topic PageRank scores for webpages. TSPR biases the computation of PageRank by replacing the classic PageRank's uniform teleport vector with topic-specific ones. However, it requires an existing manually categorized topic hierarchies to derive per-topic teleport vectors. TwitterRank extends TSPR to find topic-level experts on Twitter. Instead of predefined topic hierarchies, a set of topics is first produced by typical LDA on the tweets. Then TwitterRank applies a method similar to TSPR to compute the per-topic experts rank. These methods perform inferior to those approaches in the second camp that integrate text topic discovery and expert identification in the same model [2].

LDA-based methods extend the LDA, which is a popular unsupervised technique for topic discovery in large document collections. Link-LDA model is a mixed membership model to jointly model text and citations in the same generative process in the context of documents and citations. FLDA extends the Link-LDA model by capturing the content-related and content-independent reasons why a user follows another on microblog. FLDA assumes that there are two paths from which a followee can come, and introduces the path indicator to denote the path from which the followee comes. In general, although the LDA-based methods achieve relatively good results in topic-specific experts identification, there still exist several weaknesses that need to be addressed. First of all, on microblog, some popular users produce a very noisy result as they repeatedly appear in almost every topic group. Although FLDA introduced additional path-labeling process to address the popular bias problem, a followee from the popularity path is ignored and not assigned with a topic. Secondly, LDA-based models ignore the impact of user's followees in the generation of users' tweet and following relationship. In fact, users' followees play important roles in users' generated tweet and following relation.

To address the limitations of previous approaches, we propose a novel model to identify topic-specific experts on microblog.

 

3. LDA model and Link-LDA model

In this paper, to identify topic-specific experts on microblog, we adopt the framework of Link-LDA model, which is an extension of LDA model. For completeness, before the details of our proposed method, we first briefly review LDA model and Link-LDA model in this section.

LDA is one kind of latent topic modeling, which has become very popular as a completely unsupervised technique for topic discovery in large document collections. LDA exploits co-occurrence patterns of words in documents to unearth semantically meaningful probabilistic clusters of words called topics. LDA also assigns a probabilistic membership to documents in the latent topic-space, allowing us to view and process the documents in this lower-dimensional space. In its generative process, each document is endowed with a Dirichlet-distributed vector of topic proportions, and each word of the document is assumed drawn by first drawing a topic assignment from those proportions and then drawing the word from the corresponding topic distribution. The graphical representation for LDA model is depicted in Fig. 1, with the notations described in Table 1. The generative process is summarized in Fig. 2.

Fig. 1.Graphical representation of LDA model

Table 1.Notations used in our proposed model

Fig. 2.Generative process of LDA model

Link-LDA model is an extension to LDA model. This model models text and citations in the same generative process in the context of documents and citations. It is a known fact in information retrieval that a citation between two documents not only indicates topical similarity of two documents but also authoritativeness of the cited document. In the generative process of Link-LDA, for a given document, a citation to another document is created in exactly the same way as a word is created, and they share the same per-document topic distribution. Thus, this model captures the notion that documents that share the same citations and same words, tend to be on the same topic. The document’s representation in topic-space obtained from this model improves the performance of a document-classifier, compared to the representation obtained from text alone. The graphical representation for Link-LDA model is shown in Fig. 3. The generative process is described in Fig. 4.

Fig. 3.Graphical representation of Link-LDA model

Fig. 4.Generative process of Link-LDA model

 

4. Our Models

In this paper, we mainly focus on topic-specific expert identification on microblog. A topic-specific expert is defined as a user who excels in the specific topic [1]. On microblog, a user can follow another who he/she is interested and broadcast a tweet to all of his/her followers. Therefore, the tweet and following relation reflect every user's unique interest and taste. Particularly, a following relation can be interpreted as the user' vote in favor of the authoritativeness of the favorited user [1]. Therefore, we can exploit the tweet and following relation to infer the authoritativeness of a user in a specific topic.

We first introduce Base model, which models tweet and following relation in the same generative process in Section 4.1. In Section 4.2 we provide Weight model based on the Base model to address the popular bias problem. Furthermore, Followee model is described in Section 4.3, which uses followee's topic distribution as prior information to make user's topic distribution more precisely. So we get Union model by considering the similarity-based weight scheme and followee topic distribution in Section 4.4. At last, with the inferred parameters, we propose a search framework, which produces topic-specific experts that satisfy the user's query intent in Section 4.5.

4.1 Base Model

In Base model, we aggregate all the tweets for each user, and treat a user as a document and his/her following relationships to other users as citations, then Link-LDA can be applied to the microblog to identify the topic-specific experts. We assume that a user first chooses a topic from a topic distribution, and based on the chosen topic, the user chooses a word for his/her tweets. Similarly, we use the same topic distribution to choose a topic just as in the word generation. Afterwards, we choose a user to follow. Specifically, for the mth user on microblog, we first pick the per-user topic distribution θm from a Dirichlet prior with parameter ɑ. Then, to generate the nth word for the tweets of the user, a topic zm,n is first chosen from θm, after which the word wm,n is picked from the per-topic word distribution φzm,n. On the other hand, to generate the lth followee for the user, we use the same topic distribution θm to pick a topic zm,l of interest, just as in the word generation part. Afterwards, we choose a followee em,l who well addresses the picked topic from the per-topic followee distribution σzm,n.

By fitting the topic model to observational data, we infer the optimal values of parameters θ, φ and σ. The probabilities θ give the topic distribution for each user. The probabilities φ gives the word distribution for each topic, and the probabilities σ give the followee distribution for each topic. In particular, σ captures the likelihood of a user being followed by someone for a given topic. This value essentially quantifies the authoritativeness of a user on a given topic and is exactly the topic-specific authoritativeness score we want to compute.

Even though calculating the distributions is intractable for exact inference, various approximate inference models have been employed to estimate these distributions, including variational inference, expectation propagation, and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) schemes. In this paper, we use Gibbs sampling [15], a special case of MCMC approximation scheme, which is widely used to approximate target distributions for LDA-like Bayesian models as it is unbiased and simple to implement. A distributed Gibbs sampling algorithm has been proposed and demonstrated excellent scalability on large clusters [2]. The posterior distributions for Gibbs sampling in Base model are given in the equations below:

where zm,n denotes the topic of the nth word of the tweets for the mth user, and zm,l denotes the topic of the lth followee for the mth user. z-(m,n) denotes the topic for all words and followees expect zm,n, and z-(m,l) follows an analogous definition. nz,m,w is the number of times word w is assigned to topic z for the mth user, and cz,m,e is the number of times followee e is assigned to topic z for the mth user. * represents an aggregation on the corresponding dimension. For example, nz,*,w is the total number of times word w is assigned to topic z in the entire collection. is the same meaning of nz,m,w only with the nth word of tweets for the mth user excluded. Similarly, is defined in the same way as cz,m,e only without the count for the lth followee for the mth user.

After the sampling algorithm has run for appropriate number of iterations, the estimates for the parameters of θ, φ and σ can be obtained via the following equations:

where θz|m is the probability of topic z given the mth user, φw|z denotes the probability of word w given topic z, and σe|z represents the probability of followee e being followed by someone given topic z.

4.2 Weight Model

The two most common reasons for user's following other users are sharing a common interest and being popular on microblog [16]. Some popular users are followed by many users just for their popularity. These popular users produce a very noisy result because they repeatedly appear in almost every topic group. Recently, term weight schemes for LDA have gained intensive research interests [17,18]. The highly frequent words are given lower weights. The results show that the term weight schemes not only lower the likelihood of highly frequent words in the topic-word distribution, but also gain a no-trivial improvement in cross-language retrieval tasks. This line of research inspires us to consider weight schemes for Base model to improve the topic interpretability in the identification of experts on microblog.

On microblog, if a user is similar with his/her follower, we may assume that this following relation between them is caused by common interest and we can assign a higher weight to the following relation. In the opposite case, we may assume that the following relation is caused merely by being popularity and we can assign a lower value to this following relation. The bigger the similarity is, the higher the influence to the topic distributions is. Therefore, we provide a Weight model by utilizing the similarity-based weight scheme to address the popular bias. In Weight model, we incorporate user's similarity as weight into Equation 1, 2, 3 and 4 by replacing the cz,m,e with as follows:

where cz,m,e is the number of times followee e is assigned to topic z for the mth user, sim(m,e) is the similarity between the mth user and his/her followee e, and λ is a scaling constant. The bigger the similarity is, the higher the influence to the topic distribution is. If we set all sim(m,e) weights =1 and λ =1, this reduces immediately to Base model. The graphical representation for Weight model is shown in Fig. 5.

Fig. 5.Graphical representation of Weight model

User's following relation and tweet reflect user's interest and taste on microblog. Intuitively, two users can be considered similar if they share many common words in their associated tweets or follow many common users. Therefore, we utilize structure similarity and content similarity to measure users' similarity in this paper. Specifically, the content similarity of the mth user and his/her followee e is defined as:

where vm,i represents the weight of the ith word in the vocabulary for the mth user. The weight of words can be calculated by using the classic TF-IDF formula. This quantity is 0 if the mth user and his/her followee e have no shared words, and 1 if they have used exactly the same words, in the same relative proportions.

The structure similarity of the mth user and his/her followee e is defined as:

where Γ+(m) is the set of followees of the mth user, |∙| denotes the size of the set.

We make a linear combination of the content similarity and structure similarity. As a result, the similarity between the mth user and his/her followee e is:

4.3 Followee Model

Users are strongly influenced by their followees on microblog. Base model however ignores the impact of user's followees in the generation of users' tweets and following relations. In order to reflect the intuition that followees have impact on the content constitution of the users, we provide Followee model by integrating followees into Base model as prior information to make user's topic distribution more precisely. In the generation of tweets and followees, topic of a user is split into two parts: the idea of the user and the knowledge from his/her followees. We combine user and his/her followees' topic distributions together to generate the topic. So the generating the topic layer is no longer controlled only by the user topic distribution only. Instead, both the user and his/her followees play the role of generating the topic. However, among all of a user's followees, some followees may have similar taste with this user, while some other followees may have different tastes. We use similarity which allows us to treat user's followees differently. If the mth user and his/her followee e are very similar, then followee e should contribute more. On the other hand, if these two users are dissimilar, then e should contribute less. Thus, the combined topic distribution is:

Fig. 6 shows the graphical representation of Followee model, and Fig. 7 describes its generative process.

Fig. 6.Graphical representation of Followee model

Fig. 7.Generative process of Followee model

The posterior distributions for Gibbs sampling in Followee model are:

Then parameters θ, φ and σ are estimated as follow:

4.4 Union Model

In this section, we design Union model to model similarity-based weight scheme and followee-based prior information into the Base model simultaneously to improve the accuracy of expert identification on microblog. The posterior distributions and parameters in Union model are obtained by replacing cz,m,e in Equation 11, 12, 13, and 15 with .

4.5 Querying Topic-Specific Authorities

Finally, we propose a search framework for topic-specific expert identification on microblog. The framework allows a user to express his/her interests by typing a set of keywords. Then the framework returns an ordered list of experts by their authoritativeness score that satisfy the user's intent.

More specifically, by fitting the topic model to observational data, the optimal values of parameters θz|m and σe|z are inferred as part of the result. θz|m is the probability of topic z given the mth user, and σe|z represents the probability of followee e being followed by someone given topic z. If we treat a query q as a new user, we can learn θz|q from our model, the probability of topic z given the query q, which represents the weight of interested topics of the query keyword. On the other hand, σe|z can be quantified the authoritativeness of followee e on a given topic z. At the same time, the LDA-based model is too coarse to be used as the only representation [19]. So we combine the content similarity to refine the query. As the result, the final authoritativeness score auth(q,u) for a user u given a query q is computed as

Finally, the experts are returned in decreasing order of their authoritativeness scores auth(q,u).

 

5. Experiments

In this section, we evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed model on two real-world microblog datasets collected from Tencent Weibo and Sina Weibo. We quantitatively analyze our proposed model on Tencent Weibo dataset in Section 5.1. We then give examples of topic-specific experts on Sina Weibo dataset in Section 5.2.

5.1 Effectiveness on Tencent Weibo Dataset

In this section, we systematically evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed model on a dataset from Tencent Weibo. Tencent Weibo is a Chinese microblog website, launched by Tencent in 2010. It has become one of leading microblog platforms in China. The dataset we use for evaluation in this paper is the dataset used in the KDD Cup 2012 Track1. Track 1 in KDD Cup 2012 provides rich information across multiple domains such as user profiles, following relationship, and keyword. In particular, the dataset contains the set of provided VIP users, which enables us to systematically evaluate the accuracy of various methods. These VIP users are manually labeled by Tencent Weibo administrators, According to Tencent Weibo, the VIP users are typically famous people and organizations. In other words, they are “experts” in their corresponding topics. As a result, the VIP users can be used as the “ground truth” for our empirical evaluation. The basic statistics of the Tencent Weibo dataset is given in Table 2. We held out 10% of the data for test purposes and trained the models on the remaining 90%.

Table 2.Statistics of experimental datasets

We first evaluate the quality of the discovered topics based on two evaluation metrics: avg_catSim and avg_KL. In the topic model, σ captures the likelihood of a user being followed by someone for a given topic. This value can be viewed as the topic-specific authoritativeness score. Therefore, we choose the top 50 users for each topic as topic-specific experts in decreasing order of their values σ, and measure the category similarity of the top 50 users. In this dataset, VIP users are organized in hierarchical categories, where categories in different levels are separated by a dot, and categories are anonymized as integers, such as 1.2.4.5. Formally, we suppose that vector Gu=(gu,1,gu,2,...,gu,t)T represents the hierarchical category for VIP user u, where gu,i is the category in the ith level for user u, and t is the number of category level. The category similarity of user u and user v in topic z is defined as:

where ɛ is a small number to avoid logarithm of zero, and ⊕ is defined as:

avg_catSim is the average value of catSim of all topics. By definition, a higher avg_catSim score indicates a better algorithm.

Kullback-Leibler divergence (DKL) is also known as the relative entropy, which is generally used to reflect the difference between two probability distributions. The average Kullback-Leibler divergence (avg_KL) between topics can also expressed as the performance of the algorithm. A higher avg_KL score indicates a better algorithm. Formally, avg_KL is defined as:

where T is the total number of VIP users.

We compare Base, Weight, Followee and Union model, which are described in Section 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4 respectively. For every algorithm, we set ɑ=0.1, β=0.1 and γ=0.1. The number of topics K is varied from 20 to 100. We run Gibbs sampling for 500 iterations. We run multiple runs to find the optimal parameter value λ=30.

Fig. 8 and Fig. 9 present the avg_catSim and avg_KL of the discovered topics as a function of the numbers of topics for four models on Tencent Weibo dataset. As shown in both figures, Base model is usually the worst among all methods. The Weight model and Followee model are consistently better than Base model by a significant margin. The Weight model extends Base model by incorporating users' similarity as weight into the conditional probabilities to address the popular bias. Followee model views the followees as the prior information which users have had to refine the users' topic distribution. The results are consistent with our intuition. Union model produces better results than the others, thanks to simultaneously incorporating the similarity and prior information of followees to further refine the model.

Fig. 8.avg_catSim comparison of four models

Fig. 9.avg_KL comparison of four models

We then measure the accuracy of querying topic-specific experts of our proposed model. For each category, we use one VIP user (i.e. all the keywords of this user) as the query, and employ the standard Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) metric to analyze the results across all categories. Let Q denote a set of queries. For each query q∈Q, each algorithm returns an ordered list of users by their authoritativeness. The Reciprocal Rank of a ranked list is the multiplicative inverse of the rank of the first hit in the list. The MRR score of an algorithm is the average reciprocal rank obtained by the ranked lists given by the algorithm with respect to the query set Q. Formally,

where rankq is the rank of the first real expert in the ranked list for query q. By definition, a higher MRR score denotes a better algorithm.

In the following, we compare Union model with TwitterRank and FLDA. The TwitterRank algorithm was originally proposed to find topic-level authorities on Twitter. It extends typical Topic-Sensitive PageRank to compute per-topic influence scores. The transition probability between two nodes in TwitterRank is defined based on the topical similarity between the corresponding users. FLDA can detect topics and infer experts at the same time. Furthermore, it differentiates the different reasons why a user follows another. In our experiments, we set the number of topics to 100, and run Gibbs sampling for 500 iterations. The priors used are 0.1 for ɑ, β and γ. For Union model, λ is 30.

Fig. 10 shows the MRR score of each algorithm on the Tencent Weibo dataset. It is observed that TwitterRank is inferior to the other two algorithms because of separation between the topic analysis and the expert detection. FLDA is inferior to Union model. Although FLDA introduces additional path-labeling process to address the popular bias, a followee from the popularity path is ignored and not assigned with a topic. Union model outperforms all the other algorithms for detecting topics and inferring experts in the same time, and incorporating the similarity and prior information of followee.

Fig. 10.MRR comparision of three models

5.2 Effectiveness on Sina Weibo Dataset

In this section, we give examples of search on Sina Weibo dataset for a list of experts. Sina Weibo is the largest microblog service in China. The dataset we use in this section is published by Jie Tang’s group (https://aminer.org/Influencelocality), which is crawled from Sina Weibo between October 2009 and January 2010. The dataset contains users’ descriptions, following relationships among them, and their tweets. The basic statistics of the dataset is given in Table 2. We use 80% of the data as a training set and the remaining 20% of the data as a test set. We compare Union model with TwitterRank and FLDA. We set ɑ=0.1, β=0.1, γ=0.1, λ=30 and K=100. We run Gibbs sampling for 500 iterations.

Table 3 shows the results of top five experts identified by TwitterRank, FLDA and Union model in two specific topics respectively. Together with Sina Weibo User ID, we show rank, follower count, and the description of each user. By going over the users’ descriptions, we highlight the irrelevant experts for clarity. As shown from the table, we can see that Union model produces better results than the competing methods in two specific topics. For example, for the first query topic: delicious food, the second user and the third user in the ranked list identified by TwitterRank are not relevant to delicious food. FLDA misidentified an Internet analyst as expert in delicious food. By contrast, Union model successfully identified popular users relevant to this specific topic. For the second query topic: photography, Car enthusiast found by TwitterRank and Chinese Basketball News produced by FLDA are much less relevant to photography, whereas the top five users produced by Union model are all relevant to photography. From the results of the table, we note that TwitterRank produces more irrelevant experts with high numbers of followers, which clearly shows that separating the topic discovery and expert identification performs inferior to the approaches that integrate them in the same process. FLDA model reduces the chance of popular users' appearing in the irrelevant topic groups by labeling non-topic-driven following relations with popularity path. However, FLDA ignores topics of some popular users. As a result, some popular relevant users are removed from the specific topics. At the same time, FLDA still suffers from presence of a few irrelevant users in the specific topics. Compared with TwitterRank and FLDA, Union model produced better results by incorporating the similarity and prior information of followees in Base model to produce the user's topic distribution more precisely.

Table 3.Examples of top five experts identified by three models

 

6. Conclusion

This paper addresses the problem of topic-specific expert identification on microblog. To model topic-specific authoritativeness, we introduce a novel method, which jointly models text and following relation in the same generative process. Furthermore, we integrate a similarity-based weight scheme into the model and use followee topic distribution as prior information to make user's topic distribution more precisely. Our empirical study on two real-world datasets shows that our proposed model produces higher quality results than the prior arts.