A Preliminary Approach to Domain-based Evaluation of Users’ Trustworthiness in Online Social Networks

Abstract

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are a fertile medium through which users can unleash their opinions and share their thoughts, activities and knowledge of various topics and domains. This medium allows legitimate users as well as spammers to publish their content, leveraging the open environment and fewer restrictions associated with OSNs. Hence, it is essential to evaluate users' credibility in various domains and accordingly make judgements about potentially influential users in a particular domain(s). Most of the existing trustworthiness evaluation approaches of users and their posts in OSNs are generic-based approaches. There is a lack of domain-based trustworthiness evaluation mechanisms. In OSNs, discovering users' influence in a specific domain has been motivated by its significance in a broad range of applications such as personalized recommendation systems and expertise retrieval. The aim of this paper is to present a preliminary approach to evaluating domain-based user's trustworthiness in OSNs. We provide a novel distinguishing measurement for users in a set of knowledge domains. Domains are extracted from the user's content using semantic analysis. In order to obtain the level of trustworthiness, a metric incorporating a number of attributes extracted from content analysis and user analysis is consolidated and formulated considering temporal factor. The approach presented in this paper is promising since it provides a fine-grained trustworthiness analysis of users and their domains of interest in the OSNs.