Using social media for air pollution detection-the case of Eastern China Smog

Air pollution has become an urgent issue that affecting public health and people’s daily life in China. Social media as potential air quality sensors to surveil air pollution is emphasized recently. In this research, we picked up a case-2013 Eastern China smog and focused on two of the most popular Chinese microblog platforms Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo. The purpose of this study is to determine whether social media can be capable to be used as ‘sensors’ to monitor air pollution in China and to provide an innovative model for air pollution detection through social media. Based on that, we propose our research question, how a salient change of air quality expressed on social media discussions to reflect the extent of air pollution. Hence, our research (1) determine the correlation between the volume of air quality-related messages and observed Air quality index (AQI) with the help of time series analysis model; (2) investigate further the impact of a salient change of air quality on the relationship between the people’s subjective perceptions regarding to air pollution released on the Weibo and the extent of air pollution through a co-word network analysis model. Our study illustrates that the discussions on social media about air quality reflect the level of air pollution when the air quality changes saliently

A rule dynamics approach to event detection in Twitter with its application to sports and politics

The increasing popularity of Twitter as social network tool for opinion expression as well as informa- tion retrieval has resulted in the need to derive computational means to detect and track relevant top- ics/events in the network. The application of topic detection and tracking methods to tweets enable users to extract newsworthy content from the vast and somehow chaotic Twitter stream. In this paper, we ap- ply our technique named Transaction-based Rule Change Mining to extract newsworthy hashtag keywords present in tweets from two different domains namely; sports (The English FA Cup 2012) and politics (US Presidential Elections 2012 and Super Tuesday 2012). Noting the peculiar nature of event dynamics in these two domains, we apply different time-windows and update rates to each of the datasets in order to study their impact on performance. The performance effectiveness results reveal that our approach is able to accurately detect and track newsworthy content. In addition, the results show that the adaptation of the time-window exhibits better performance especially on the sports dataset, which can be attributed to the usually shorter duration of football events

Spoken content retrieval: A survey of techniques and technologies

Speech media, that is, digital audio and video containing spoken content, has blossomed in recent years. Large collections are accruing on the Internet as well as in private and enterprise settings. This growth has motivated extensive research on techniques and technologies that facilitate reliable indexing and retrieval. Spoken content retrieval (SCR) requires the combination of audio and speech processing technologies with methods from information retrieval (IR). SCR research initially investigated planned speech structured in document-like units, but has subsequently shifted focus to more informal spoken content produced spontaneously, outside of the studio and in conversational settings. This survey provides an overview of the field of SCR encompassing component technologies, the relationship of SCR to text IR and automatic speech recognition and user interaction issues. It is aimed at researchers with backgrounds in speech technology or IR who are seeking deeper insight on how these fields are integrated to support research and development, thus addressing the core challenges of SCR

Effectiveness of Corporate Social Media Activities to Increase Relational Outcomes

This study applies social media analytics to investigate the impact of different corporate social media activities on user word of mouth and attitudinal loyalty. We conduct a multilevel analysis of approximately 5 million tweets regarding the main Twitter accounts of 28 large global companies. We empirically identify different social media activities in terms of social media management strategies (using social media management tools or the web-frontend client), account types (broadcasting or receiving information), and communicative approaches (conversational or disseminative). We find positive effects of social media management tools, broadcasting accounts, and conversational communication on public perception