A Temporal Psycholinguistics Approach to Identity Resolution of Social Media Users

In this thesis, we propose an approach to identity resolution across social media platforms using the topics, sentiments, and timings of the posts on the platforms. After collecting the public posts of around 5000 profiles from Disqus and Twitter, we analyze their posts to match their profiles across the two platforms. We pursue both temporal and non-temporal methods in our analysis. While neither approach proves definitively superior, the temporal approach generally performs better. We found that the temporal window size influences results more than the shifting amount. On the other hand, our sentiment analysis shows that the inclusion of sentiment makes little difference, probably due to flawed data extraction methods. We also experimented with a distance-based reward-and-punishment-focused scoring model, which achieved an accuracy of 24.198% and an average rank of 158.217 out of 2525 in our collected corpus. Future work includes refining sentiment analysis by evaluating sentiments per topic, extending temporal analysis with additional phases, and improving the scoring model through weight adjustments and modified rewards.