Extracting Interest Tags from Twitter User Biographies

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under International Research Centres in Singapore Funding Initiativ

Using Twitter to Understand Public Interest in Climate Change: The case of Qatar

Climate change has received an extensive attention from public opinion in the last couple of years, after being considered for decades as an exclusive scientific debate. Governments and world-wide organizations such as the United Nations are working more than ever on raising and maintaining public awareness toward this global issue. In the present study, we examine and analyze Climate Change conversations in Qatar's Twittersphere, and sense public awareness towards this global and shared problem in general, and its various related topics in particular. Such topics include but are not limited to politics, economy, disasters, energy and sandstorms. To address this concern, we collect and analyze a large dataset of 109 million tweets posted by 98K distinct users living in Qatar -- one of the largest emitters of CO2 worldwide. We use a taxonomy of climate change topics created as part of the United Nations Pulse project to capture the climate change discourse in more than 36K tweets. We also examine which topics people refer to when they discuss climate change, and perform different analysis to understand the temporal dynamics of public interest toward these topics.Comment: Will appear in the proceedings of the International Workshop on Social Media for Environment and Ecological Monitoring (SWEEM'16

Fetishizing Food in Digital Age: #foodporn Around the World

International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2016International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), 2016What food is so good as to be considered pornographic? Worldwide, the popular #foodporn hashtag has been used to share appetizing pictures of peoples' favorite culinary experiences. But social scientists ask whether #foodporn promotes an unhealthy relationship with food, as pornography would contribute to an unrealistic view of sexuality. In this study, we examine nearly 10 million Instagram posts by 1.7 million users worldwide. An overwhelming (and uniform across the nations) obsession with chocolate and cake shows the domination of sugary dessert over local cuisines. Yet, we find encouraging traits in the association of emotion and health-related topics with #foodporn, suggesting food can serve as motivation for a healthy lifestyle. Social approval also favors the healthy posts, with users posting with healthy hashtags having an average of 1,000 more followers than those with unhealthy ones. Finally, we perform a demographic analysis which shows nation-wide trends of behavior, such as a strong relationship (r=0.51) between the GDP per capita and the attention to healthiness of their favorite food. Our results expose a new facet of food "pornography", revealing potential avenues for utilizing this precarious notion for promoting healthy lifestyles

A quantitative analysis of biographical data from Ainm, the Irish-language Biographical Database

This paper looks at some trends identifiable in the biographical data contained in the Ainm collection of Irish-language related biographies. The data structure is described and the reasons for its particular structure are outlined. The structured data is then analysed to identify some notable patterns and significant gaps in the Ainm biographical collection. These features and omissions are discussed in the context of the creation of both the original print biographical dictionary (the Beathaisnéis series) and the more recent digital version (www.ainm.ie)

Inferring user interests in microblogging social networks: a survey

With the growing popularity of microblogging services such as Twitter in recent years, an increasing number of users are using these services in their daily lives. The huge volume of information generated by users raises new opportunities in various applications and areas. Inferring user interests plays a significant role in providing personalized recommendations on microblogging services, and also on third-party applications providing social logins via these services, especially in cold-start situations. In this survey, we review user modeling strategies with respect to inferring user interests from previous studies. To this end, we focus on four dimensions of inferring user interest profiles: (1) data collection, (2) representation of user interest profiles, (3) construction and enhancement of user interest profiles, and (4) the evaluation of the constructed profiles. Through this survey, we aim to provide an overview of state-of-the-art user modeling strategies for inferring user interest profiles on microblogging social networks with respect to the four dimensions. For each dimension, we review and summarize previous studies based on specified criteria. Finally, we discuss some challenges and opportunities for future work in this research domain

An Exploratory Study of COVID-19 Misinformation on Twitter

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have conducted an exploratory study into the propagation, authors and content of misinformation on Twitter around the topic of COVID-19 in order to gain early insights. We have collected all tweets mentioned in the verdicts of fact-checked claims related to COVID-19 by over 92 professional fact-checking organisations between January and mid-July 2020 and share this corpus with the community. This resulted in 1 500 tweets relating to 1 274 false and 276 partially false claims, respectively. Exploratory analysis of author accounts revealed that the verified twitter handle(including Organisation/celebrity) are also involved in either creating (new tweets) or spreading (retweet) the misinformation. Additionally, we found that false claims propagate faster than partially false claims. Compare to a background corpus of COVID-19 tweets, tweets with misinformation are more often concerned with discrediting other information on social media. Authors use less tentative language and appear to be more driven by concerns of potential harm to others. Our results enable us to suggest gaps in the current scientific coverage of the topic as well as propose actions for authorities and social media users to counter misinformation.Comment: 20 pages, nine figures, four tables. Submitted for peer review, revision

Winning the War for Talent: An Experimental Evaluation of Online Recruitment Campaigns Using Twitter

Organizations have moved rapidly from traditional recruitment methods to online recruiting. The present study argues that the fierce demand for labor in technology-related industries —“second war for talent”— besieges workers in competitive environments to the point of lowering their propensity to engage in online recruiting campaigns. Collecting data from the social media platform Twitter, we take an experimental approach to investigate the effectiveness of online recruitment processes in attracting the attention of potential job candidates from different occupational categories. The findings reveal that workers in technology, engineering, and mathematical occupations (TEM) are less likely to react to recruitment processes than workers in other professional jobs. However, motivated advertisement designed according to individual group interests significantly increase the rate of participation of TEM, while these ads have no effect on workers from other sectors. Our experiment helps to explain pre-hiring outcomes. The findings have important implications for organizations seeking to boost their talent acquisition strategies

A large-scale sentiment analysis using political tweets

Twitter has become a key element of political discourse in candidates’ campaigns. The political polarization on Twitter is vital to politicians as it is a popular public medium to analyze and predict public opinion concerning political events. The analysis of the sentiment of political tweet contents mainly depends on the quality of sentiment lexicons. Therefore, it is crucial to create sentiment lexicons of the highest quality. In the proposed system, the domain-specific of the political lexicon is constructed by using the supervised approach to extract extreme political opinions words, and features in tweets. Political multi-class sentiment analysis (PMSA) system on the big data platform is developed to predict the inclination of tweets to infer the results of the elections by conducting the analysis on different political datasets: including the Trump election dataset and the BBC News politics. The comparative analysis is the experimental results which are better political text classification by using the three different models (multinomial naïve Bayes (MNB), decision tree (DT), linear support vector classification (SVC)). In the comparison of three different models, linear SVC has the better performance than the other two techniques. The analytical evaluation results show that the proposed system can be performed with 98% accuracy in linear SVC

Analyzing biography collections historiographically as Linked Data : Case National Biography of Finland

Biographical collections are available on the Web for close reading. However, the underlying texts can also be used for data analysis and distant reading, if the documents are available as data. Such data is usable for creating intelligent user interfaces to biographical data, including Digital Humanities tooling for visualizations, data analysis, and knowledge discovery in biographical and prosopographical research. In this paper, we re-use biographical collection data from a historiographical perspective for analyzing the underlying collection. For example: What kind of people have been included in the collection? Does the language used for describing female biographees differ from that for men? As a case study, the Finnish National Biography, available as part of the Linked Open Data service and semantic portal BiographySampo - Finnish Biographies on the Semantic Web is used. The analyses show interesting results related to, e.g., how specific prosopographical groups, such as women or professional groups are represented and portrayed. Various novel statistics and network analyses of the biographees are presented. Our analyses give new insights to the editors of the National Biography as well as to researchers in biography, prosopography, and historiography. The presented approach can be applied also to similar biography collections in other countries.Peer reviewe