Discipline: Informatique

In recent years, social network sites exploded in popularity and become an important part of the online activities on the web. This success is related to the various services/functionalities provided by each site (ranging from media sharing, tagging, blogging, and mainly to online social networking) pushing users to subscribe to several sites and consequently to create several social networks for different purposes and contexts (professional, private, etc.). Nevertheless, current tools and sites provide limited functionalities to organize and identify relationship types within and across social networks which is required in several scenarios such as enforcing users’ privacy, and enhancing targeted social content sharing, etc. Particularly, none of the existing social network sites provides a way to automatically identify relationship types while considering users’ personal information and published data. In this work, we propose a new approach to identify relationship types among users within either a single or several social networks. We provide a user-oriented framework able to consider several features and shared data available in user profiles (e.g., name, age, interests, photos, etc.). This framework is built on a rule-based approach that operates at two levels of granularity: 1) within a single social network to discover social relationships (i.e., colleagues, relatives, friends, etc.) by exploiting mainly photos’ features and their embedded metadata, and 2) across different social networks to discover co-referent relationships (same real-world persons) by considering all profiles’ attributes weighted by the user profile and social network contents. At each level of granularity, we generate a set of basic and derived rules that are both used to discover relationship types. To generate basic rules, we propose two distinct methodologies. On one hand, social relationship basic rules are generated from a photo dataset constructed using crowdsourcing. On the other hand, using all weighted attributes, co-referent relationship basic rules are generated from the available pairs of profiles having the same unique identifier(s) attribute(s) values. To generate the derived rules, we use a mining technique that takes into account the context of users, namely by identifying frequently used valid basic rules for each user. We present here our prototype, called RelTypeFinder, implemented to validate our approach. It allows to discover appropriately different relationship types, generate synthetic datesets, collect web data and photo, and generate mining rules. We also describe here the sets of experiments conducted on real-world and synthetic datasets. The evaluation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed relationship discovery approach.