60 research outputs found
The Early Bird Catches The Term: Combining Twitter and News Data For Event Detection and Situational Awareness
Twitter updates now represent an enormous stream of information originating
from a wide variety of formal and informal sources, much of which is relevant
to real-world events. In this paper we adapt existing bio-surveillance
algorithms to detect localised spikes in Twitter activity corresponding to real
events with a high level of confidence. We then develop a methodology to
automatically summarise these events, both by providing the tweets which fully
describe the event and by linking to highly relevant news articles. We apply
our methods to outbreaks of illness and events strongly affecting sentiment. In
both case studies we are able to detect events verifiable by third party
sources and produce high quality summaries
Twitter language use reflects psychological differences between Democrats and Republicans
Previous research has shown that political leanings correlate with various psychological factors. While surveys and experiments provide a rich source of information for political psychology, data from social networks can offer more naturalistic and robust material for analysis. This research investigates psychological differences between individuals of different political orientations on a social networking platform, Twitter. Based on previous findings, we hypothesized that the language used by liberals emphasizes their perception of uniqueness, contains more swear words, more anxiety-related words and more feeling-related words than conservatives' language. Conversely, we predicted that the language of conservatives emphasizes group membership, contains more certainty and more references to achievement and religion than liberals' language. We analysed Twitter timelines of 5,373 followers of three Twitter accounts of the American Democratic and 5,386 followers of three accounts of the Republican parties' Congressional Organizations. The results support most of the predictions and previous findings, confirming that Twitter behaviour offers valid insights to offline behaviour
Extraction of Relevant Data from Social Media Based on Termino-Ontological Resources: Application to Meningitis Surveillance via Twitter
International audienc
DEFENDER: Detecting and Forecasting Epidemics Using Novel Data-Analytics for Enhanced Response
In recent years social and news media have increasingly been used to explain patterns in disease activity and progression. Social media data, principally from the Twitter network, has been shown to correlate well with official disease case counts. This fact has been exploited to provide advance warning of outbreak detection, forecasting of disease levels and the ability to predict the likelihood of individuals developing symptoms. In this paper we introduce DEFENDER, a software system that integrates data from social and news media and incorporates algorithms for outbreak detection, situational awareness and forecasting. As part of this system we have developed a technique for creating a location network for any country or region based purely on Twitter data. We also present a disease nowcasting (forecasting the current but still unknown level) approach which leverages counts from multiple symptoms, which was found to improve the nowcasting accuracy by 37 percent over a model that used only previous case data. Finally we attempt to forecast future levels of symptom activity based on observed user movement on Twitter, finding a moderate gain of 5 percent over a time series forecasting model
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