A Simple Language Independent Approach for Distinguishing Individuals on Social Media

Abstract

Nowadays, the large-scale human activity traces on social media platforms such as Twitter provide new opportunities for various research areas such as mining user interests, understanding user behaviors, or conducting social science studies in a large scale. However, social media platforms contain not only individual accounts but also other accounts that are associated with non-individuals such as organizations or brands. Therefore, distinguishing individuals out of all accounts is crucial when we conduct research such as understanding human behavior based on data retrieved from those platforms. In this paper, we propose a language-independent approach for distinguishing individuals from non-individuals with the focus on leveraging their profile images, which has not been explored in previous studies. Extensive experiments on two datasets show that our proposed approach can provide competitive performance with state-of-the-art language-dependent methods, and outperforms alternative language-independent ones.