Patent application number | Description | Published |
20120331063 | INFERRING TOPICS FROM SOCIAL NETWORKING SYSTEM COMMUNICATIONS - A social networking system determines the meaning of an anchor term used in a communication received from a communicating user. Candidate nodes are identified in the dictionary based on the anchor term, where each candidate node represents a possible meaning of the anchor term. The context of the anchor term is determined, and a score is determined for each candidate node based on the determined context. A candidate node is selected that most likely represents the meaning of the anchor term based on the determined candidate node scores. The context of the anchor term may be a social context derived from users connected to the communicating user that use the anchor term in communications. A communicating user may be prompted to identify the meaning of the anchor term explicitly based on the use of the term in communications from other users connected to the communicating user. | 12-27-2012 |
20130132194 | TARGETING ADVERTISEMENTS TO USERS OF A SOCIAL NETWORKING SYSTEM BASED ON EVENTS - A social networking system enables advertisers to target advertisements to users who are attending events, which may be associated with concepts, temporal information, and locations. Targeting criteria for advertisements may include global events and user-generated events. Using past event attendance history, location information, and social graph information, a social networking system may generate a predictive model to estimate probabilities of whether users will attend an event. Confidence scores may be generated for users for an event based on the predictive model. Advertisements may be targeted to users based on events using the confidence scores. Event attendance by users may be used in a fuzzy matching algorithm by the social networking system in providing advertisements to users of the social networking system. | 05-23-2013 |
20130159110 | TARGETING USERS OF A SOCIAL NETWORKING SYSTEM BASED ON INTEREST INTENSITY - A social networking system may enable advertisers to target advertisements to users interested, in varying levels of intensity, in concepts, locations, pages, and other objects on the social networking system. Targeting criteria for advertisements may include explicit interest intensity levels in selected objects. Using past histories of user engagement, location information, and social graph information, a social networking system may generate a predictive model to estimate interest intensity levels of users in the selected objects. Advertisements may be targeted and provided to users based on interest intensity using the predictive model. | 06-20-2013 |
20140052540 | PROVIDING CONTENT USING INFERRED TOPICS EXTRACTED FROM COMMUNICATIONS IN A SOCIAL NETWORKING SYSTEM - A social networking system may infer interests based on extracted topics from content items on the social networking system. A user's comments and page likes in a social networking system are used to infer topics in which the user is interested. Topics may also be automatically extracted from users' posts, and the extracted topics may be generalized using a category tree to identify additional topics for the user. The social networking system may target content such as advertisements to users based on these extracted topics. For example, the social networking system may boost stories related to the extracted topics in the user's content feeds, append stories about the extracted topics to advertisements that are also related to the topics, append advertisements to stories about the extracted topics, or use the extracted topics as targeting criteria for an advertisement. | 02-20-2014 |
20140143326 | Authenticating a Persona in a Social Networking System - A social networking system provides access to personas comprising information, for example, web pages describing users or entities. The information may be suggested by the social networking system or requested by the user, for example, via search. The social networking system authenticates the personas so that only authentic personas are suggested to users or returned when a user is searching for information. The authenticity of a persona is determined based on the connections and/or likes coming from other personas, user accounts, or other entities represented within the social networking system that have been previously authenticated. The authenticity of the person is also determined based on external links to the persona, for example, external websites referring to the persona or the rate at which external systems such as search engines direct web traffic to the persona. | 05-22-2014 |
20140143327 | Authenticating a Persona in a Social Networking System - A social networking system provides access to personas comprising information, for example, web pages describing users or entities. The information may be suggested by the social networking system or requested by the user, for example, via search. The social networking system authenticates the personas so that only authentic personas are suggested to users or returned when a user is searching for information. The authenticity of a persona is determined based on the connections and/or likes coming from other personas, user accounts, or other entities represented within the social networking system that have been previously authenticated. The authenticity of the person is also determined based on external links to the persona, for example, external websites referring to the persona or the rate at which external systems such as search engines direct web traffic to the persona. | 05-22-2014 |
20140149215 | DETERMINING KEYWORDS FOR CONTENT ITEMS - A social networking system receives a request to generate a post including a content item from a user and extracts a topic from the content item. Using the extracted topic, the social networking system identifies candidate keywords, each associated with one or more expected values. The social networking system may use information associated with the user to determine the expected values associated with the candidate keywords. Using the expected values, the social networking system ranks the candidate keywords and selects a keyword from the candidate keywords based on the ranking. Based on the selected keyword the social networking system generates a link to content and includes the link to content and the generated content item in the post that is presented to the user. | 05-29-2014 |
20140207568 | BIASING SELECTION OF ADVERTISING BASED ON REAL-TIME USER INTERACTIONS IN A SOCIAL NETWORKING SYSTEM - A social networking system receives advertisement requests from advertisers describing information about advertisements and determines one or more ad topics associated with the advertisements. When an advertisement is to be presented to a user, the social networking system determines one or more topics associated with the user from actions performed by the user and identifies candidate advertisements having ad topics matching, or similar to, the topics associated with the user. The topics associated with the user may be determined based on the user's most recent actions. One or more of the candidate advertisements are selected for presentation to the user. | 07-24-2014 |
20140244622 | DETERMINING PHRASE OBJECTS BASED ON RECEIVED USER INPUT CONTEXT INFORMATION - A composer interface allows a user to provide input, such as text data, to the social networking system. To reduce the number of inputs for a user to provide to the social networking system, one or more phrase objects are presented to the user when providing input. A phrase object includes a group of objects that users have previously provided to the social networking system. The social networking system presents phrase objects to the user that match at least a portion of the received input. Context information associated with the input and associated with various phrase objects may be used to select the presented phrase objects. By selecting a presented phrase object, the user includes the selected phrase object in the input. | 08-28-2014 |