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The field of social network analysis has identified User Alignment (UA) as a crucial area of investigation. The objective of UA is to identify and connect user accounts across diverse social networks, even when there are no explicit interconnections. UA plays a pivotal role in synthesising coherent user profiles and delving into the intricacies of user behaviour across platforms. However, traditional approaches have encountered limitations. Singular embedding techniques have been found to fall short in fully capturing the semantic essence of user profile attributes. Furthermore, classification-based embedding methods lack definitive criteria for categorisation, thereby constraining both the efficacy and applicability of these models. This paper presents a novel unsupervised Gradient Semantic Model for User Alignment (GSMUA) for the purpose of identifying common user identities across social networks. GSMUA categorises user profile information into weak, sub, and strong gradients based on the semantic intensity of attributes. Different gradient semantic levels direct attention to literal features, semantic features, or a combination of both during feature extraction, thereby achieving a full semantic representation of user attributes. In the case of strongly semantic long texts, GSMUA employs Named Entity Recognition (ENR) technology in order to enhance the inefficient handling of such texts. Furthermore, GSMUA compensates for missing user profile attributes by utilising profile information from user neighbours, thereby reducing the negative impact of missing user profile attributes on model performance. Extensive experiments conducted on four pairs of real datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach. In comparison to the most effective previously developed unsupervised methods, GSMUA demonstrates improvements in hit-precision ranging from 5.32 to 12.17%. When compared to supervised methods, the improvements range from 0.71 to 11.79%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurately aligning the same users on different flat social networks to merge user information and create more nuanced user profiles is critical. However, the current research in this area faces challenges related to low efficiency and inadequate alignment accuracy. To address these challenges, we introduce a cross-social network user alignment model based on multi-dimensional user features (MDUF). First, inspired by the principles of entity recognition and Hartley's association method, we employed a block matrix association algorithm to project the original dataset into different high-dimensional spaces. Second, we proposed a new inertia weight calculation method to improve the convergence speed from linear to nonlinear transformations. This method improves the performance of traditional particle swarm optimization algorithms. Finally, we utilize improved particle swarm optimization and residual connection techniques to optimize bidirectional long short-term memory networks. The experimental results show that our proposed model significantly outperforms traditional alignment models in terms of alignment efficiency and accuracy, which is highly practical and has the potential to inspire further research on social network user alignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The field of social network analysis has identified User Alignment (UA) as a crucial area of investigation. The objective of UA is to identify and connect user accounts across diverse social networks, even when there are no explicit interconnections. UA plays a pivotal role in synthesising coherent user profiles and delving into the intricacies of user behaviour across platforms. However, traditional approaches have encountered limitations. Singular embedding techniques have been found to fall short in fully capturing the semantic essence of user profile attributes. Furthermore, classification-based embedding methods lack definitive criteria for categorisation, thereby constraining both the efficacy and applicability of these models. This paper presents a novel unsupervised Gradient Semantic Model for User Alignment (GSMUA) for the purpose of identifying common user identities across social networks. GSMUA categorises user profile information into weak, sub, and strong gradients based on the semantic intensity of attributes. Different gradient semantic levels direct attention to literal features, semantic features, or a combination of both during feature extraction, thereby achieving a full semantic representation of user attributes. In the case of strongly semantic long texts, GSMUA employs Named Entity Recognition (ENR) technology in order to enhance the inefficient handling of such texts. Furthermore, GSMUA compensates for missing user profile attributes by utilising profile information from user neighbours, thereby reducing the negative impact of missing user profile attributes on model performance. Extensive experiments conducted on four pairs of real datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach. In comparison to the most effective previously developed unsupervised methods, GSMUA demonstrates improvements in hit-precision ranging from 5.32 to 12.17%. When compared to supervised methods, the improvements range from 0.71 to 11.79%.

Accurately aligning the same users on different flat social networks to merge user information and create more nuanced user profiles is critical. However, the current research in this area faces challenges related to low efficiency and inadequate alignment accuracy. To address these challenges, we introduce a cross-social network user alignment model based on multi-dimensional user features (MDUF). First, inspired by the principles of entity recognition and Hartley's association method, we employed a block matrix association algorithm to project the original dataset into different high-dimensional spaces. Second, we proposed a new inertia weight calculation method to improve the convergence speed from linear to nonlinear transformations. This method improves the performance of traditional particle swarm optimization algorithms. Finally, we utilize improved particle swarm optimization and residual connection techniques to optimize bidirectional long short-term memory networks. The experimental results show that our proposed model significantly outperforms traditional alignment models in terms of alignment efficiency and accuracy, which is highly practical and has the potential to inspire further research on social network user alignment.

Random-walk-based graph representation methods have been widely applied in User Identity Linkage (UIL) tasks, which links overlapping users between two different social networks. It can help us to obtain more comprehensive portraits of criminals, which is helpful for improving cyberspace governance. Yet, random walk generates a large number of repeating sequences, causing unnecessary computation and storage overhead. This paper proposes a novel method called Edge-Removing Walk (ERW) that can replace random walk in random-walk-based models. It removes edges once they are walked in a walk round to capture the l − h o p features without repetition, and it walks the whole graph for several rounds to capture the different kinds of paths starting from a specific node. Experiments proved that ERW can exponentially improve the efficiency for random-walk-based UIL models, even maintaining better performance. We finally generalize ERW into a general User Identity Linkage framework called ERW-UIL and verify its performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-social network user identification refers to finding users with the same identity in multiple social networks, which is widely used in the cross-network recommendation, link prediction, personality recommendation, and data mining. At present, the traditional method is to obtain network structure information from neighboring nodes through graph convolution, and embed social networks into the low-dimensional vector space. However, as the network depth increases, the effect of the model will decrease. Therefore, in order to better obtain the network embedding representation, a Transformer-based user alignment model (TUAM) across social networks is proposed. This model converts the node information and network structure information from the graph data form into sequence data through a specific encoding method. Then, it inputs the data to the proposed model to learn the low-dimensional vector representation of the user. Finally, it maps the two social networks to the same feature space for alignment. Experiments on real datasets show that compared with GAT, TUAM improved ACC@10 indicators by 11.61% and 16.53% on Facebook–Twitter and Weibo–Douban datasets, respectively. This illustrates that the proposed model has a better performance compared to other user alignment models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User alignment can associate multiple social network accounts of the same user. It has important research implications. However, the same user has various behaviors and friends across different social networks. This will affect the accuracy of user alignment. In this paper, we aim to improve the accuracy of user alignment by reducing the semantic gap between the same user in different social networks. Therefore, we propose a semantically enhanced social network user alignment algorithm (SENUA). The algorithm performs user alignment based on user attributes, user-generated contents (UGCs), and user check-ins. The interference of local semantic noise can be reduced by mining the user's semantic features for these three factors. In addition, we improve the algorithm's adaptability to noise by multi-view graph-data augmentation. Too much similarity of non-aligned users can have a large negative impact on the user-alignment effect. Therefore, we optimize the embedding vectors based on multi-headed graph attention networks and multi-view contrastive learning. This can enhance the similar semantic features of the aligned users. Experimental results show that SENUA has an average improvement of 6.27% over the baseline method at hit-precision30. This shows that semantic enhancement can effectively improve user alignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User alignment (UA), a central issue for social network analysis, aims to recognize the same natural persons across different social networks. Existing studies mainly focus on the positive effects of incorporating user attributes and network structure on UA. However, there have been few in-depth studies into the existing challenges for the joint integration of different types of text attributes, the imbalance between user attributes and network structure, and the utilization of massive unidentified users. To this end, this paper presents a high-accuracy embedding model named Joint embedding of Attributes and Relations for User Alignment (JARUA), to tackle the UA problem. First, a mechanism that can automatically identify the granularity of user attributes is introduced for handling multi-type user attributes. Second, a graph attention network is employed to extract the structural features and is integrated with user attributes features. Finally, an iterative training algorithm with quality filters is introduced to bootstrap the model performances. We evaluate JARUA on two real-world data sets. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over several state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The user alignment problem that establishes a correspondence between users across networks is a fundamental issue in various social network analyses and applications. Since symbolic representations of users suffer from sparsity and noise when computing their cross-network similarities, the state-of-the-art methods embed users into the low-dimensional representation space, where their features are preserved and establish user correspondence based on the similarities of their low-dimensional embeddings. Many embedding-based methods try to align latent spaces of two networks by learning a mapping function before computing similarities. However, most of them learn the mapping function largely based on the limited labeled aligned user pairs and ignore the distribution discrepancy of user representations from different networks, which may lead to the overfitting problem and affect the performance. To address the above problems, we propose a cycle-consistent adversarial mapping model to establish user correspondence across social networks. The model learns mapping functions across the latent representation spaces, and the representation distribution discrepancy is addressed through the adversarial training between the mapping functions and the discriminators as well as the cycle-consistency training. Besides, the proposed model utilizes both labeled and unlabeled users in the training process, which may alleviate the overfitting problem and reduce the number of labeled users required. Results of extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model on user alignment on real social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User alignment (UA), a central issue for social network analysis, aims to recognize the same natural persons across different social networks. Existing studies mainly focus on the positive effects of incorporating user attributes and network structure on UA. However, there have been few in-depth studies into the existing challenges for the joint integration of different types of text attributes, the imbalance between user attributes and network structure, and the utilization of massive unidentified users. To this end, this paper presents a high-accuracy embedding model named Joint embedding of Attributes and Relations for User Alignment (JARUA), to tackle the UA problem. First, a mechanism that can automatically identify the granularity of user attributes is introduced for handling multi-type user attributes. Second, a graph attention network is employed to extract the structural features and is integrated with user attributes features. Finally, an iterative training algorithm with quality filters is introduced to bootstrap the model performances. We evaluate JARUA on two real-world data sets. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over several state-of-the-art approaches.

User alignment across social networks can facilitate more information/knowledge transferring across networks and thereby benefit several applications, including social link prediction, cross-domain recommendation, and information diffusion. Several works try to learn a common subspace for networks by preserving the structural proximities, such that different contribution weights of neighbors are ignored as users were always connected by unweighted edges. In this paper, we propose an attention-based network embedding model that exploits the social structures for user alignment. In particular, two main components are contained in our model framework: a masked graph attention mechanism which tries to learn the alignment task driven attention weights by the supervision of pre-aligned user pairs, and an embedding algorithm tries to learn a common vector space by explicitly modeling the weighted contribution probabilities between follower-ships and followee-ships. With the learned weights and embeddings transferring between these two components, we construct a unified model for user embedding and alignment. Stochastic gradient descent and negative sampling are adopted for efficient learning and scalability. The extensive experiments on real-world social network data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed model compared with several state-of-the-art methods.

Aligning users across different social networks has become increasingly studied as an important task to social network analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel representation learning method that mainly exploits social structures for the network alignment. In particular, the proposed network embedding framework models the follower-ship and followee-ship of each user explicitly as input and output context vectors, while preserving the proximity of users with “similar” followers and followees in the embedded space. We incorporate both known and predicted user anchors across the networks as constraints to facilitate the transfer of context information to achieve accurate user alignment. Both network embedding and user alignment are inferred under a unified optimization framework with negative sampling adopted to ensure scalability. Also, variants of the proposed framework, including the incorporation of higher-order structural features, are also explored for further boosting the alignment accuracy. Extensive experiments on large-scale social and academia network datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed model compared with state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying users' accounts on different platforms is important for the management and marketing of e-commerce platforms. To address the problem of sparse consumer behavior data on e-commerce platforms, this paper designs Double Generative Adversarial Network (Double-GAN) to compensate the data. This method uses not only the data of the one platform , but also of heterogeneous e-commerce platforms for alternate iteration compensation. For the complexity of "user-behavior-commodity" data feature space of e-commerce bookstore platform. Considering Consider the advantages of model JUST in capturing structural and semantic information of multiple types of nodes. This paper proposes a new method UBC2vec to integrate user's interest in commodities and change the random walk strategy to represent the overall information of data feature space of heterogeneous e-commerce platform. Finally, for the high computational complexity of the user alignment algorithm, this paper constructs a "user-commodity" bipartite graph to delineate the roles of users and reduce the complexity. Experiments show that the model can effectively alleviate the data sparsity problem and reduce the computational complexity of the algorithm. Above the real data set, it can effectively match users' accounts in different bookstore platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]