What are the industry classes defined in this paper?
Technology, Religion, Fashion, Publishing, Sports coach, Real Estate, Law, Environment, Tourism, Construction, Museums, Banking, Security, Automotive.
Automatic profiling of social media users is an important task for supporting a multitude of downstream applications. While a number of studies have used social media content to extract and study collective social attributes, there is a lack of substantial research that addresses the detection of a user's industry. We frame this task as classification using both feature engineering and ensemble learning. Our industry-detection system uses both posted content and profile information to detect a user's industry with 64.3% accuracy, significantly outperforming the majority baseline in a taxonomy of fourteen industry classes. Our qualitative analysis suggests that a person's industry not only affects the words used and their perceived meanings, but also the number and type of emotions being expressed.
Over the past two decades, the emergence of social media has enabled the proliferation of traceable human behavior. The content posted by users can reflect who their friends are, what topics they are interested in, or which company they are working for. At the same time, users are listing a number of profile fields to define themselves to others. The utilization of such metadata has proven important in facilitating further developments of applications in advertising BIBREF0 , personalization BIBREF1 , and recommender systems BIBREF2 . However, profile information can be limited, depending on the platform, or it is often deliberately omitted BIBREF3 . To uncloak this information, a number of studies have utilized social media users' footprints to approximate their profiles. This paper explores the potential of predicting a user's industry –the aggregate of enterprises in a particular field– by identifying industry indicative text in social media. The accurate prediction of users' industry can have a big impact on targeted advertising by minimizing wasted advertising BIBREF4 and improved personalized user experience. A number of studies in the social sciences have associated language use with social factors such as occupation, social class, education, and income BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 , BIBREF8 . An additional goal of this paper is to examine such findings, and in particular the link between language and occupational class, through a data-driven approach. In addition, we explore how meaning changes depending on the occupational context. By leveraging word embeddings, we seek to quantify how, for example, cloud might mean a separate concept (e.g., condensed water vapor) in the text written by users that work in environmental jobs while it might be used differently by users in technology occupations (e.g., Internet-based computing). Specifically, this paper makes four main contributions. First, we build a large, industry-annotated dataset that contains over 20,000 blog users. In addition to their posted text, we also link a number of user metadata including their gender, location, occupation, introduction and interests. Second, we build content-based classifiers for the industry prediction task and study the effect of incorporating textual features from the users' profile metadata using various meta-classification techniques, significantly improving both the overall accuracy and the average per industry accuracy. Next, after examining which words are indicative for each industry, we build vector-space representations of word meanings and calculate one deviation for each industry, illustrating how meaning is differentiated based on the users' industries. We qualitatively examine the resulting industry-informed semantic representations of words by listing the words per industry that are most similar to job related and general interest terms. Finally, we rank the different industries based on the normalized relative frequencies of emotionally charged words (positive and negative) and, in addition, discover that, for both genders, these frequencies do not statistically significantly correlate with an industry's gender dominance ratio. After discussing related work in Section SECREF2 , we present the dataset used in this study in Section SECREF3 . In Section SECREF4 we evaluate two feature selection methods and examine the industry inference problem using the text of the users' postings. We then augment our content-based classifier by building an ensemble that incorporates several metadata classifiers. We list the most industry indicative words and expose how each industrial semantic field varies with respect to a variety of terms in Section SECREF5 . We explore how the frequencies of emotionally charged words in each gender correlate with the industries and their respective gender dominance ratio and, finally, conclude in Section SECREF6 .