Finding a Needle in the Blogosphere: An Information Fusion Approach for Blog Distillation Search

In the blogosphere, different actors express their opinions about multiple topics. Users, companies or editors socially interact by commenting, recommending and linking blogs and posts. These social media contents are increasingly growing. As a matter of fact, the size of the blogosphere is estimated to double every six months. In this context, the problem of finding a topically relevant blog to subscribe to becomes a Big Data challenge. Moreover, combining multiple types of evidence is essential for this search task. In this paper we propose a group of textual and social-based signals, and apply different Information Fusion algorithms for a blog distillation search task. Information fusion through the combination of the different types of evidence requires optimisation for appropriately weighting each source of evidence. To this end, we analyse well-established population-based search methods. Namely, global search (Particle Swarm Optimisation and Differential Evolution) and a local search method (Line Search) that has been effective in various Information Retrieval tasks. Moreover, we propose hybrid combinations between the global search and the local search method and compare all the alternatives following a standard methodology. Efficiency is an imperative here and, therefore, we focus not only on achieving high search effectiveness but also on designing efficient solutions.

keywords: Blog distillation, Particle swarm optimisation, Differential evolution, Line search, Information retrieval