title: #nowplaying Madonna: a large-scale evaluation on estimating similarities between music artists and between movies from microblogs.
abstract: Different term weighting techniques such as [Formula: see text] orBM25have been used intensely for manifold text-based information retrieval tasks. Their use for modeling term profiles for named entities and subsequent calculation of similarities between these named entities have been studied to a much smaller extent. The recent trend of microblogging made available massive amounts of information about almost every topic around the world. Therefore, microblogs represent a valuable source for text-based named entity modeling. In this paper, we present a systematic and comprehensive evaluation of differentterm weighting measures,normalization techniques,query schemes,index term sets, andsimilarity functionsfor the task of inferring similarities between named entities, based on data extracted frommicroblog posts. We analyze several thousand combinations of choices for the above mentioned dimensions, which influence the similarity calculation process, and we investigate in which way they impact the quality of the similarity estimates. Evaluation is performed using three real-world data sets: two collections of microblogs related to music artists and one related to movies. For the music collections, we present results ofgenre classification experimentsusing as benchmark genre information from allmusic.com. For the movie collection, we present results ofmulti-class classification experimentsusing as benchmark categories from IMDb. We show that microblogs can indeed be exploited to model named entity similarity with remarkable accuracy, provided the correct settings for the analyzed aspects are used. We further compare the results to those obtained when using Web pages as data source.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computational Perception, Johannes Kepler University, Altenberger Straße 69, 4040 Linz, Austria.
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schedl
keywords: Evaluation; Information extraction; Microblog analysis; Social media mining; Term weighting; Vector space model