Tracking Public Concerns: How Mobile Service Providers Understand Their Users?

With the widely use of mobile devices and services, microblogging has become a popular social media and reflects the interests and concerns of the mobile users to some extent. It is important for the mobile services providers and information distributors to track the public concerns in order to understand their mobile users' interests better and present them more appropriate contents. This paper presents an analysis method of public concerns for a special kind of post (expandable post) in microblogging service, which can provides sufficient background information about an event by its attachments, e.g. A Web URL. We use expandable posts to reconstruct the topic space at the sentence level. The reposts are regarded as public concerns within the space. By this means, public concern tracking problem is transformed into analyzing the relationships between the reposts and their corresponding expandable contents in the topic space. The preliminary experiments on our dataset about H7N9 bird flu collected from Weibo.com, shows the effectiveness of our method.