Microblogging

About: Microblogging is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4186 publications have been published within this topic receiving 137030 citations. The topic is also known as: microblog.

Collective Opinion Target Extraction in Chinese Microblogs

Abstract: Microblog messages pose severe challenges for current sentiment analysis techniques due to some inherent characteristics such as the length limit and informal writing style. In this paper, we study the problem of extracting opinion targets of Chinese microblog messages. Such fine-grained word-level task has not been well investigated in microblogs yet. We propose an unsupervised label propagation algorithm to address the problem. The opinion targets of all messages in a topic are collectively extracted based on the assumption that similar messages may focus on similar opinion targets. Topics in microblogs are identified by hashtags or using clustering algorithms. Experimental results on Chinese microblogs show the effectiveness of our framework and algorithms.

On-line relevant anomaly detection in the Twitter stream: an efficient bursty keyword detection model

Abstract: On-line social networks have become a massive communication and information channel for users world-wide. In particular, the microblogging platform Twitter, is characterized by short-text message exchanges at extremely high rates. In this type of scenario, the detection of emerging topics in text streams becomes an important research area, essential for identifying relevant new conversation topics, such as breaking news and trends. Although emerging topic detection in text is a well established research area, its application to large volumes of streaming text data is quite novel. Making scalability, efficiency and rapidness, the key aspects for any emerging topic detection algorithm in this type of environment.Our research addresses the aforementioned problem by focusing on detecting significant and unusual bursts in keyword arrival rates or bursty keywords. We propose a scalable and fast on-line method that uses normalized individual frequency signals per term and a windowing variation technique. This method reports keyword bursts which can be composed of single or multiple terms, ranked according to their importance. The average complexity of our method is O(n log n), where n is the number of messages in the time window. This complexity allows our approach to be scalable for large streaming datasets. If bursts are only detected and not ranked, the algorithm remains with lineal complexity O(n), making it the fastest in comparison to the current state-of-the-art. We validate our approach by comparing our performance to similar systems using the TREC Tweet 2011 Challenge tweets, obtaining 91% of matches with LDA, an off-line gold standard used in similar evaluations. In addition, we study Twitter messages related to the SuperBowl football events in 2011 and 2013.

Through a Glass, Darkly: Tactical Support and Symbolic Association in Twitter Messages Commenting on Stuttgart 21

Abstract: Political actors increasingly use the microblogging service, Twitter, for the organization, coordination, and documentation of collective action. These interactions with Twitter leave digital artifacts that can be analyzed. In this article, we look at Twitter messages commenting on one of the most contentious protests in Germany's recent history, the protests against the infrastructure project Stuttgart 21. We analyze all messages containing the hashtag #s21 that were posted between May 25, 2010, and November 14, 2010, by the 80,000 most followed Twitter users in Germany. We do this to answer three questions: First, what distinguishes events that resulted in high activity on Twitter from events that did not? Second, during times of high activity, does the behavior of Twitter users vary from their usual behavior patterns? Third, were the artifacts (retweets, links) that dominated conversations during times of high activity indicative of tactical support of the protests or of symbolic association with it?

BursT: a dynamic term weighting scheme for mining microblogging messages

Abstract: One of the basic human needs is to exchange information and socialize with each other. Online microblogging services such as Twitter allow users to post very short messages related to everything ranging from mundane daily life routines to breaking news events. A key challenging issue of mining such social messages is how to analyze the real-time distributed messages and extract significant features of them in a dynamic environment. In this work, we propose a novel term weighting method, called BursT, using sliding window techniques for weighting message streams. The experimental results show that our weighting technique has an outstanding performance to reflect the shifts of concept drift. The result of this work can be extended to perform a periodic feature extraction, and also be able to integrate other sophisticated clustering methods to enhance the efficiency for real-time event mining in social networks.