Extracting semantic entities and events from sports tweets

Large volumes of user-generated content on practically every major issue and event are being created on the microblogging site Twitter. This content can be combined and processed to detect events, entities and popular moods to feed various knowledge-intensive practical applications. On the downside, these content items are very noisy and highly informal, making it difficult to extract sense out of the stream. In this paper, we exploit various approaches to detect the named entities and significant micro-events from users’ tweets during a live sports event. Here we describe how combining linguistic features with background knowledge and the use of Twitter-specific features can achieve high, precise detection results (f-measure = 87%) in different datasets. A study was conducted on tweets from cricket matches in the ICC World Cup in order to augment the event-related non-textual media with collective intelligence

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

Tracking Dengue Epidemics using Twitter Content Classification and Topic Modelling

Detecting and preventing outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases such as Dengue and Zika in Brasil and other tropical regions has long been a priority for governments in affected areas. Streaming social media content, such as Twitter, is increasingly being used for health vigilance applications such as flu detection. However, previous work has not addressed the complexity of drastic seasonal changes on Twitter content across multiple epidemic outbreaks. In order to address this gap, this paper contrasts two complementary approaches to detecting Twitter content that is relevant for Dengue outbreak detection, namely supervised classification and unsupervised clustering using topic modelling. Each approach has benefits and shortcomings. Our classifier achieves a prediction accuracy of about 80\% based on a small training set of about 1,000 instances, but the need for manual annotation makes it hard to track seasonal changes in the nature of the epidemics, such as the emergence of new types of virus in certain geographical locations. In contrast, LDA-based topic modelling scales well, generating cohesive and well-separated clusters from larger samples. While clusters can be easily re-generated following changes in epidemics, however, this approach makes it hard to clearly segregate relevant tweets into well-defined clusters.Comment: Procs. SoWeMine - co-located with ICWE 2016. 2016, Lugano, Switzerlan

Social Bots: Human-Like by Means of Human Control?

Social bots are currently regarded an influential but also somewhat mysterious factor in public discourse and opinion making. They are considered to be capable of massively distributing propaganda in social and online media and their application is even suspected to be partly responsible for recent election results. Astonishingly, the term `Social Bot' is not well defined and different scientific disciplines use divergent definitions. This work starts with a balanced definition attempt, before providing an overview of how social bots actually work (taking the example of Twitter) and what their current technical limitations are. Despite recent research progress in Deep Learning and Big Data, there are many activities bots cannot handle well. We then discuss how bot capabilities can be extended and controlled by integrating humans into the process and reason that this is currently the most promising way to go in order to realize effective interactions with other humans.Comment: 36 pages, 13 figure

Clustering Memes in Social Media

The increasing pervasiveness of social media creates new opportunities to study human social behavior, while challenging our capability to analyze their massive data streams. One of the emerging tasks is to distinguish between different kinds of activities, for example engineered misinformation campaigns versus spontaneous communication. Such detection problems require a formal definition of meme, or unit of information that can spread from person to person through the social network. Once a meme is identified, supervised learning methods can be applied to classify different types of communication. The appropriate granularity of a meme, however, is hardly captured from existing entities such as tags and keywords. Here we present a framework for the novel task of detecting memes by clustering messages from large streams of social data. We evaluate various similarity measures that leverage content, metadata, network features, and their combinations. We also explore the idea of pre-clustering on the basis of existing entities. A systematic evaluation is carried out using a manually curated dataset as ground truth. Our analysis shows that pre-clustering and a combination of heterogeneous features yield the best trade-off between number of clusters and their quality, demonstrating that a simple combination based on pairwise maximization of similarity is as effective as a non-trivial optimization of parameters. Our approach is fully automatic, unsupervised, and scalable for real-time detection of memes in streaming data.Comment: Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM'13), 201

Clustering of twitter technology tweets and the impact of stopwords on clusters

Year of 2010 could be termed as the year in which Twitter became completely mainstream. Twitter, which started as a means of communicating with friends, became much more than its beginning. Now Twitter is used by companies to promote their new products, used by movie industry to promote movies. A lot of advertising and branding is now tied to Twitter and most importantly any breaking news that happens, the first place one goes and tries to find is to search it on Twitter. Be it the Mumbai attacks that happened in 2008, or the minor earthquakes that happened in Bay Area in 2010 or the twitter revolution cause of the Iran elections, most of the tech and not so tech savvy viewers were following twitter rather than any main stream news channels. In fact most of the breaking news now comes on Twitter because of the huge number of user base rather than the traditional mainstream media. The focus of this paper is clustering with the TF-IDF weighted mechanism of daily technology news tweets of prominent bloggers and news sites using Apache Mahout and to evaluate the effects of introducing and removing stop words on the quality of clustering. This project restricts itself to only tweets in the English language