A Wikipedia-based approach to profiling activities on social media

Online user profiling is a very active research field, catalyzing great interest by both scientists and practitioners. In this paper, in particular, we look at approaches able to mine social media activities of users to create a rich user profile. We look at the case in which the profiling is meant to characterize the user's interests along a set of predefined dimensions (that we refer to as categories). A conventional way to do so is to use semantic analysis techniques to (i) extract relevant entities from the online conversations of users (ii) mapping said entities to the predefined categories of interest. While entity extraction is a well-understood topic, the mapping part lacks a reference standardized approach. In this paper we propose using graph navigation techniques on the Wikipedia tree to achieve such a mapping. A prototypical implementation is presented and some preliminary results are reported.