Detecting Traffic Information From Social Media Texts With Deep Learning Approaches

Mining traffic-relevant information from social media data has become an emerging topic due to the real-time and ubiquitous features of social media. In this paper, we focus on a specific problem in social media mining which is to extract traffic relevant microblogs from Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging platform. It is transformed into a machine learning problem of short text classification. First, we apply the continuous bag-of-word model to learn word embedding representations based on a data set of three billion microblogs. Compared to the traditional one-hot vector representation of words, word embedding can capture semantic similarity between words and has been proved effective in natural language processing tasks. Next, we propose using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory (LSTM) models and their combination LSTM-CNN to extract traffic relevant microblogs with the learned word embeddings as inputs. We compare the proposed methods with competitive approaches, including the support vector machine (SVM) model based on a bag of n-gram features, the SVM model based on word vector features, and the multi-layer perceptron model based on word vector features. Experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed deep learning approaches

Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Data

Internet and the proliferation of smart mobile devices have changed the way information is created, shared, and spreads, e.g., microblogs such as Twitter, weblogs such as LiveJournal, social networks such as Facebook, and instant messengers such as Skype and WhatsApp are now commonly used to share thoughts and opinions about anything in the surrounding world. This has resulted in the proliferation of social media content, thus creating new opportunities to study public opinion at a scale that was never possible before. Naturally, this abundance of data has quickly attracted business and research interest from various fields including marketing, political science, and social studies, among many others, which are interested in questions like these: Do people like the new Apple Watch? Do Americans support ObamaCare? How do Scottish feel about the Brexit? Answering these questions requires studying the sentiment of opinions people express in social media, which has given rise to the fast growth of the field of sentiment analysis in social media, with Twitter being especially popular for research due to its scale, representativeness, variety of topics discussed, as well as ease of public access to its messages. Here we present an overview of work on sentiment analysis on Twitter.Comment: Microblog sentiment analysis; Twitter opinion mining; In the Encyclopedia on Social Network Analysis and Mining (ESNAM), Second edition. 201

Streaming Social Event Detection and Evolution Discovery in Heterogeneous Information Networks

Events are happening in real world and real time, which can be planned and organized for occasions, such as social gatherings, festival celebrations, influential meetings, or sports activities. Social media platforms generate a lot of real-time text information regarding public events with different topics. However, mining social events is challenging because events typically exhibit heterogeneous texture and metadata are often ambiguous. In this article, we first design a novel event-based meta-schema to characterize the semantic relatedness of social events and then build an event-based heterogeneous information network (HIN) integrating information from external knowledge base. Second, we propose a novel Pairwise Popularity Graph Convolutional Network, named as PP-GCN, based on weighted meta-path instance similarity and textual semantic representation as inputs, to perform fine-grained social event categorization and learn the optimal weights of meta-paths in different tasks. Third, we propose a streaming social event detection and evolution discovery framework for HINs based on meta-path similarity search, historical information about meta-paths, and heterogeneous DBSCAN clustering method. Comprehensive experiments on real-world streaming social text data are conducted to compare various social event detection and evolution discovery algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms other alternative social event detection and evolution discovery techniques