User Classification with Multiple Textual Perspectives

Textual information is of critical importance for automatic user classification in social media. However, most previous studies model textual features in a single perspective while the text in a user homepage typically possesses different styles of text, such as original message and comment from others. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, namely ensemble LSTM, to user classification by incorporating multiple textual perspectives. Specifically, our approach first learns a LSTM representation with a LSTM recurrent neural network and then presents a joint learning method to integrating all naturallydivided textual perspectives. Empirical studies on two basic user classification tasks, i.e., gender classification and age classification, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach to user classification with multiple textual perspectives.