Extracting relationship information within social network using activity profiles

Abstract

Suppose in a messaging system, people can send messages to each other. Each complete message has a sender ID, a sending time, a receiver ID and a receiving time. The first problem in the thesis discusses a situation where somehow each complete message got broken into two half messages: a sent half message (with a sender ID and a sending time) and a received half message (with a receiver ID and a receiving time) and there is no link between them. At this point, instead of having a list of complete messages, we have a list of sent half messages and a list of received half messages with no link between them. Our goal is to rebuild the complete messages by pairing the sent and received half messages together. To achieve our goal, we need to find a bipartite matching between the sent half messages and the received half messages. The thesis provides two approaches for this problem: