User Profiling through Deep Multimodal Fusion

User profiling in social media has gained a lot of attention due to its varied set of applications in advertising, marketing, recruiting, and law enforcement. Among the various techniques for user modeling, there is fairly limited work on how to merge multiple sources or modalities of user data - such as text, images, and relations - to arrive at more accurate user profiles. In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach that extracts and fuses information across different modalities. Our hybrid user profiling framework utilizes a shared representation between modalities to integrate three sources of data at the feature level, and combines the decision of separate networks that operate on each combination of data sources at the decision level. Our experimental results on more than 5K Facebook users demonstrate that our approach outperforms competing approaches for inferring age, gender and personality traits of social media users. We get highly accurate results with AUC values of more than 0.9 for the task of age prediction and 0.95 for the task of gender prediction.