An evaluation of keyword extraction from online communication for the characterisation of social relations

The set of interpersonal relationships on a social network service or a similar online community is usually highly heterogenous. The concept of tie strength captures only one aspect of this heterogeneity. Since the unstructured text content of online communication artefacts is a salient source of information about a social relationship, we investigate the utility of keywords extracted from the message body as a representation of the relationship’s characteristics as reflected by the conversation topics. Keyword extraction is performed using standard natural language processing methods. Communication data and human assessments of the extracted keywords are obtained from Facebook users via a custom application. The overall positive quality assessment provides evidence that the keywords indeed convey relevant information about the relationship. This article is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled ‘Towards an NLP-based Topic Characterization of Social Relations’ presented at the 2012 ASE International Conference on Social Informatics (Washington D.C., USA, Dec. 14-16, 2012).