ECharacterize: A Novel Feature Selection-Based Framework for Characterizing Entrepreneurial Influencers in Arabic Twitter

Abstract— Social media are widely used as communication platforms in the world of business. Twitter, in particular, offers valuable opportunities for collaboration due to its open nature. For that, many entrepreneurs employ Twitter for different reasons, such as mobilizing financial resources, get funding, and increase their innovation capabilities. Therefore, they keep looking for local entrepreneurial accounts to help them. Messages from entrepreneurial influencers -opinion leader- increase the information diffusion to entrepreneurs, helping them to find more opportunities. Discovering the characteristics of entrepreneurial influencers in Twitter networks becomes extremely important since it reflects the way to reach entrepreneurs. In the present paper, we propose a novel framework called ECharacterize based on feature selections techniques to discover the characteristics of the entrepreneurial influencer in the Saudi context in a robust manner. The framework extracts abundant influencers’ features and then employs seven state-of-the-art ranking methods to determine the characteristics of the most relevant influencer. It robustly aggregates the lists to come out with the accurate final list using Robust Rank Aggregation. The framework examined on 233,018 real-life Arabic tweets. The results show the ability of the proposed method to distinguish between the influencers by their popularity, reliability and activity level.