Massive volumes of data continuously generated on social platforms have become an important information source for users. A primary method to obtain fresh and valuable information from social streams is . Although there have been extensive studies on social search, existing methods only focus on the of query results but ignore the . In this paper, we propose a novel Semantic and Influence aware @math -Representative ( @math -SIR) query for social streams based on topic modeling. Specifically, we consider that both user queries and elements are represented as vectors in the topic space. A @math -SIR query retrieves a set of @math elements with the maximum over the sliding window at query time w.r.t. the query vector. The representativeness of an element set comprises both semantic and influence scores computed by the topic model. Subsequently, we design two approximation algorithms, namely (MTTS) and (MTTD), to process @math -SIR queries in real-time. Both algorithms leverage the ranked lists maintained on each topic for @math -SIR processing with theoretical guarantees. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of @math -SIR query compared with existing methods as well as the efficiency and scalability of our proposed algorithms for @math -SIR processing.
 Social media advertising is a multi-billion dollar market and has become the major revenue source for Facebook and Twitter. To deliver ads to potentially interested users, these social network platforms learn a prediction model for each user based on their personal interests. However, as user interests often evolve slowly, the user may end up receiving repetitive ads. In this paper, we propose a context-aware advertising framework that takes into account the relatively static personal interests as well as the dynamic news feed from friends to drive growth in the ad click-through rate. To meet the real-time requirement, we first propose an online retrieval strategy that finds k most relevant ads matching the dynamic context when a read operation is triggered. To avoid frequent retrieval when the context varies little, we propose a safe region method to quickly determine whether the top-k ads of a user are changed. Finally, we propose a hybrid model to combine the merits of both methods by analyzing the dynamism of news feed to determine an appropriate retrieval strategy. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple real social networks and ad datasets verified the efficiency and robustness of our hybrid model. Many real applications in real-time news stream advertising call for efficient processing of long queries against short text. In such applications, dynamic news feeds are regarded as queries to match against an advertisement (ad) database for retrieving the k most relevant ads. The existing approaches to keyword retrieval cannot work well in this search scenario when queries are triggered at a very high frequency. To address the problem, we introduce new techniques to significantly improve search performance. First, we devise a two-level partitioning for tight upper bound estimation and a lazy evaluation scheme to delay full evaluation of unpromising candidates, which can bring three to four times performance boosting in a database with 7 million ads. Second, we propose a novel rank-aware block-oriented inverted index to further improve performance. In this index scheme, each entry in an inverted list is assigned a rank according to its importance in the ad. Then, we introduce a block-at-a-time search strategy based on the index scheme to support a much tighter upper bound estimation and a very early termination. We have conducted experiments with real datasets, and the results show that the rank-aware method can further improve performance by an order of magnitude.