Extracting textual features from tweets is a challenging process due to the noisy nature of the content and the weak signal of most of the words used. In this paper, we propose using singular value decomposition (SVD) with clustering to enhance the signals of the textual features in the tweets to improve the correlation with events. The proposed technique applies SVD to the time series vector for each feature to factorize the matrix of feature/day counts, in order to ensure the independence of the feature vectors. Afterwards, the k-means clustering is applied to build a look-up table that maps members of each cluster to the cluster-centroid. The lookup table is used to map each feature in the original data to the centroid of its cluster, then we calculate the sum of the term frequency vectors of all features in each cluster to the term-frequency-vector of the cluster centroid. To test the technique we calculated the correlations of the cluster centroids with the golden standard record (GSR) vector before and after summing the vectors of the cluster members to the centroid-vector. The proposed method is applied to multiple correlation techniques including the Pearson, Spearman, distance correlation and Kendal Tao. The experiments have also considered the different word forms and lengths of the features including keywords, n-grams, skip-grams and bags-of-words. The correlation results are enhanced significantly as the highest correlation scores have increased from 0.3 to 0.6, and the average correlation scores have increased from 0.3 to 0.4.
Event detection using social media streams needs a set of informative features with strong signals that need minimal preprocessing and are highly associated with events of interest. Identifying these informative features as keywords from Twitter is challenging, as people use informal language to express their thoughts and feelings. This informality includes acronyms, misspelled words, synonyms, transliteration and ambiguous terms. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to select the keywords frequently used in Twitter that are mostly associated with events of interest such as protests. …
We investigate networks formed by keywords in tweets and study their community structure. Based on datasets of tweets mined from over seven hundred political figures in the U.S. and Canada, we hypothesize that such Twitter keyword networks exhibit a small number of communities. Our results are further reinforced by considering via so-called pseudo-tweets generated randomly and using AI-based language generation software. We speculate as to the possible origins of the small community hypothesis and further attempts at validating it.
Online social media such as the micro-blogging site Twitter has become a rich source of real-time data on online human behaviors. Here we analyze the occurrence and co-occurrence frequency of keywords in user posts on Twitter. From the occurrence rate of major international brand names, we provide examples on predictions of brand-user behaviors. From the co-occurrence rates, we further analyze the user-perceived relationships between international brand names and construct the corresponding relationship networks. In general the user activity on Twitter is highly intermittent and we show that t…
How can we study social interactions on evolving topics at a mass scale? Over the past decade, researchers from diverse fields such as economics, political science, and public health have often done this by querying Twitter's public API endpoints with hand-picked topical keywords to search or stream discussions. However, despite the API's accessibility, it remains difficult to select and update keywords to collect high-quality data relevant to topics of interest. In this paper, we propose an active learning method for rapidly refining query keywords to increase both the yielded topic relevance…
National Institute on Drug Abuse（美国国家药物滥用研究所）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized social movement protesting violence against Black individuals and communities, with a focus on police brutality. The movement gained significant attention following the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd in 2020. The #BlackLivesMatter social media hashtag has come to represent the grassroots movement, with similar hashtags counter protesting the BLM movement, such as #AllLivesMatter, and #BlueLivesMatter. We introduce a data set of 63.9 million tweets from 13.0 million users from over 100 countries which contain one of the fo…
Digital traces of conversations in micro-blogging platforms and OSNs provide information about user opinion with a high degree of resolution. These information sources can be exploited to under- stand and monitor collective behaviors. In this work, we focus on polarization classes, i.e., those topics that require the user to side exclusively with one position. The proposed method provides an iterative classification of users and keywords: first, polarized users are identified, then polarized keywords are discovered by monitoring the activities of previously classified users. This method thus a…
Twitter is a social network that offers a rich and interesting source of information challenging to retrieve and analyze. Twitter data can be accessed using a REST API. The available operations allow retrieving tweets on the basis of a set of keywords but with limitations such as the number of calls per minute and the size of results. Besides, there is no control on retrieved results and finding tweets which are relevant to a specific topic is a big issue. Given these limitations, it is important that the query keywords cover unambiguously the topic of interest in order to both reach the relev…
Twitter accounts have already been used in many scientometric studies, but the meaningfulness of the data for societal impact measurements in research evaluation has been questioned. Earlier research focused on social media counts and neglected the interactive nature of the data. We explore a new network approach based on Twitter data in which we compare author keywords to hashtags as indicators of topics. We analyze the topics of tweeted publications and compare them with the topics of all publications (tweeted and not tweeted). Our exploratory study is based on a comprehensive publication se…
Center for Data Science（数据科学中心）；New York University（纽约大学）；School of Medicine（医学院）
Twitter data has been shown broadly applicable for public health surveillance. Previous public health studies based on Twitter data have largely relied on keyword-matching or topic models for clustering relevant tweets. However, both methods suffer from the short-length of texts and unpredictable noise that naturally occurs in user-generated contexts. In response, we introduce a deep learning approach that uses hashtags as a form of supervision and learns tweet embeddings for extracting informative textual features. In this case study, we address the specific task of estimating state-level obe…
With the significant increase in users on social media platforms, a new means of political campaigning has appeared. Twitter and Facebook are now notable campaigning tools during elections. Indeed, the candidates and their parties now take to the internet to interact and spread their ideas. In this paper, we aim to identify political communities formed on Twitter during the 2022 French presidential election and analyze each respective community. We create a large-scale Twitter dataset containing 1.2 million users and 62.6 million tweets that mention keywords relevant to the election. We perfor…
False claims about COVID-19 vaccines can undermine public trust in ongoing vaccination campaigns, thus posing a threat to global public health. Misinformation originating from various sources has been spreading online since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we present a dataset of Twitter posts that exhibit a strong anti-vaccine stance. The dataset consists of two parts: a) a streaming keyword-centered data collection with more than 1.8 million tweets, and b) a historical account-level collection with more than 135 million tweets. The former leverages the Twitter streaming…
We present a new machine learning and text information extraction approach to detection of cyber threat events in Twitter that are novel (previously non-extant) and developing (marked by significance with respect to similarity with a previously detected event). While some existing approaches to event detection measure novelty and trendiness, typically as independent criteria and occasionally as a holistic measure, this work focuses on detecting both novel and developing events using an unsupervised machine learning approach. Furthermore, our proposed approach enables the ranking of cyber threa…
Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, users are increasingly turning to online services. An increase in social media usage has also been observed, leading to the suspicion that this has also raised cyberbullying. In this initial work, we explore the possibility of an increase in cyberbullying incidents due to the pandemic and high social media usage. To evaluate this trend, we collected 454,046 cyberbullying-related public tweets posted between January 1st, 2020 -- June 7th, 2020. We summarize the tweets containing multiple keywords into their daily counts. Our analysis showed the existence of at m…
A salient dynamic property of social media is bursting behavior. In this paper, we study bursting behavior in terms of the temporal relation between a preceding baseline fluctuation and the successive burst response using a frequency time series of 3,000 keywords on Twitter. We found that there is a fluctuation threshold up to which the burst size increases as the fluctuation increases and that above the threshold, there appears a variety of burst sizes. We call this threshold the critical threshold. Investigating this threshold in relation to endogenous bursts and exogenous bursts based on pe…
This paper presents a predictive model for Influenza-Like-Illness, based on Twitter traffic. We gather data from Twitter based on a set of keywords used in the Influenza wikipedia page, and perform feature selection over all words used in 3 years worth of tweets, using real ILI data from the Greek CDC. We select a small set of words with high correlation to the ILI score, and train a regression model to predict the ILI score cases from the word features. We deploy this model on a streaming application and feed the resulting time-series to FluHMM, an existing prediction model for the phases of …
Background: Twitter has become the "wild-west" of marketing and promotional strategies for advertisement agencies. Electronic cigarettes have been heavily marketed across Twitter feeds, offering discounts, "kid-friendly" flavors, algorithmically generated false testimonials, and free samples. Methods:All electronic cigarette keyword related tweets from a 10% sample of Twitter spanning January 2012 through December 2014 (approximately 850,000 total tweets) were identified and categorized as Automated or Organic by combining a keyword classification and a machine trained Human Detection algorith…
University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；National Institute of Informatics（日本国立信息学研究所）
Systems that exploit publicly available user generated content such as Twitter messages have been successful in tracking seasonal influenza. We developed a novel filtering method for Influenza-Like-Illnesses (ILI)-related messages using 587 million messages from Twitter micro-blogs. We first filtered messages based on syndrome keywords from the BioCaster Ontology, an extant knowledge model of laymen's terms. We then filtered the messages according to semantic features such as negation, hashtags, emoticons, humor and geography. The data covered 36 weeks for the US 2009 influenza season from 30t…
We construct a novel database containing hundreds of thousands geotagged messages related to the COVID-19 pandemic sent on Twitter. We create a daily index of social distancing -- at the state level -- to capture social distancing beliefs by analyzing the number of tweets containing keywords such as "stay home", "stay safe", "wear mask", "wash hands" and "social distancing". We find that an increase in the Twitter index of social distancing on day t-1 is associated with a decrease in mobility on day t. We also find that state orders, an increase in the number of COVID cases, precipitation and …
To curb the problem of false information, social media platforms like Twitter started adding warning labels to content discussing debunked narratives, with the goal of providing more context to their audiences. Unfortunately, these labels are not applied uniformly and leave large amounts of false content unmoderated. This paper presents LAMBRETTA, a system that automatically identifies tweets that are candidates for soft moderation using Learning To Rank (LTR). We run LAMBRETTA on Twitter data to moderate false claims related to the 2020 US Election and find that it flags over 20 times more tw…
This study seeks to validate a search protocol of ill health-related terms using Twitter data which can later be used to understand if, and how, Twitter can reveal information on the current health situation. We extracted conversations related to health and disease postings on Twitter using a set of pre-defined keywords, assessed the prevalence, frequency, and timing of such content in these conversations, and validated how this search protocol was able to detect relevant disease tweets. Classification and Regression Trees (CART) algorithm was used to train and test search protocols of disease…
We uncover a previously unknown, ongoing astroturfing attack on the popularity mechanisms of social media platforms: ephemeral astroturfing attacks. In this attack, a chosen keyword or topic is artificially promoted by coordinated and inauthentic activity to appear popular, and, crucially, this activity is removed as part of the attack. We observe such attacks on Twitter trends and find that these attacks are not only successful but also pervasive. We detected over 19,000 unique fake trends promoted by over 108,000 accounts, including not only fake but also compromised accounts, many of which …
Among the topics discussed on social media, some spark more heated debate than others. For example, experience suggests that major political events, such as a vote for healthcare law in the US, would spark more debate between opposing sides than other events, such as a concert of a popular music band. Exploring the topics of discussion on Twitter and understanding which ones are controversial is extremely useful for a variety of purposes, such as for journalists to understand what issues divide the public, or for social scientists to understand how controversy is manifested in social interacti…
Methods for detecting and summarizing emergent keywords have been extensively studied since social media and microblogging activities have started to play an important role in data analysis and decision making. We present a system for monitoring emergent keywords and summarizing a document stream based on the dynamic semantic graphs of streaming documents. We introduce the notion of dynamic eigenvector centrality for ranking emergent keywords, and present an algorithm for summarizing emergent events that is based on the minimum weight set cover. We demonstrate our system with an analysis of st…
The micro-blogging platform Twitter allows its nearly 320 million monthly active users to build a network of follower connections to other Twitter users (i.e., followees) in order to subscribe to content posted by these users. With this feature, Twitter has become one of the most popular social networks on the Web and was also the first platform that offered the concept of hashtags. Hashtags are freely-chosen keywords, which start with the hash character, to annotate, categorize and contextualize Twitter posts (i.e., tweets). Although hashtags are widely accepted and used by the Twitter commun…
The rapid diffusion of "microblogging" services such as Twitter is ushering in a new era of possibilities for organizations to communicate with and engage their core stakeholders and the general public. To enhance understanding of the communicative functions microblogging serves for organizations, this study examines the Twitter utilization practices of the 100 largest nonprofit organizations in the United States. The analysis reveals there are three key functions of microblogging updates-"information," "community," and "action." Though the informational use of microblogging is extensive, nonp…
The purpose of this study is to clarify what kind of news is easily retweeted and what kind of news is easily Liked. We believe these actions, retweeting and Liking, have different meanings for users. Understanding this difference is important for understanding people's interest in Twitter. To analyze the difference between retweets (RT) and Likes on Twitter in detail, we focus on word appearances in news titles. First, we calculate basic statistics and confirm that tweets containing news URLs have different RT and Like tendencies compared to other tweets. Next, we compared RTs and Likes for e…
Social media have substantially altered the way brands and businesses advertise: Online Social Networks provide brands with more versatile and dynamic channels for advertisement than traditional media (e.g., TV and radio). Levels of engagement in such media are usually measured in terms of content adoption (e.g., likes and retweets) and sentiment, around a given topic. However, sentiment analysis and topic identification are both non-trivial tasks. In this paper, using data collected from Twitter as a case study, we analyze how engagement and sentiment in promoted content spread over a 10-day …
Analyzing COVID-19 Vaccination Sentiments in Nigerian Cyberspace: Insights from a Manually Annotated Twitter Dataset
Northeastern University（东北大学）；HausaNLP（豪萨自然语言处理实验室）；Bayero University Kano（卡诺巴耶罗大学）；University of Porto（波尔图大学）；Ahmadu Bello University（艾哈迈杜·贝洛大学）；University Of Maiduguri（迈杜古里大学）；University of Abuja（阿布贾大学）
One way to assess a certain aspect of the value of scientific research is to measure the attention it receives on social media. While previous research has mostly focused on the "number of mentions" of scientific research on social media, the current study applies "topic networks" to measure public attention to scientific research on Twitter. Topic networks are the networks of co-occurring author keywords in scholarly publications and networks of co-occurring hashtags in the tweets mentioning those scholarly publications. This study investigates which topics in opioid scholarly publications ha…
Information flows are the result of a constant exchange in Online Social Networks (OSNs). OSN users create and share varying types of information in real-time throughout a day. Virality is introduced as a term to describe information that reaches a wide audience within a small time-frame. As a case, we measure propagation of information submitted in Reddit, identify different patterns and present a multi OSN diffusion analysis on Twitter, Facebook, and 2 hosting domains for images and multimedia, ImgUr and YouTube. Our results indicate that positive content is the most shared and presents the …
Web applications are increasingly showing recommended users from social media along with some descriptions, an attempt to show relevancy - why they are being shown. For example, Twitter search for a topical keyword shows expert twitterers on the side for 'whom to follow'. Google+ and Facebook also recommend users to follow or add to friend circle. Popular Internet newspaper- The Huffington Post shows Twitter influencers/ experts on the side of an article for authoritative relevant tweets. The state of the art shows user profile bios as summary for Twitter experts, but it has issues with length…
The importance of collective social action in current events is manifest in the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. Electronic social media have become a pervasive channel for social interactions, and a basis of collective social response to information. The study of social media can reveal how individual actions combine to become the collective dynamics of society. Characterizing the groups that form spontaneously may reveal both how individuals self-identify and how they will act together. Here we map the social, political, and geographical properties of news-sharing communities on Twitter, a …
The first objective towards the effective use of microblogging services such as Twitter for situational awareness during the emerging disasters is discovery of the disaster-related postings. Given the wide range of possible disasters, using a pre-selected set of disaster-related keywords for the discovery is suboptimal. An alternative that we focus on in this work is to train a classifier using a small set of labeled postings that are becoming available as a disaster is emerging. Our hypothesis is that utilizing large quantities of historical microblogs could improve the quality of classificat…
Many in the US were reluctant to report their COVID-19 cases at the height of the pandemic (e.g., for fear of missing work or other obligations due to quarantine mandates). Other methods such as using public social media data can therefore help augment current approaches to surveilling pandemics. This study evaluated the effectiveness of using social media data as a data source for tracking public health pandemics. There have been several attempts at using social media data from platforms like Twitter for analyzing the COVID-19 pandemic. While these provide a multitude of useful insights, new …
COVID-19 pandemic has generated what public health officials called an infodemic of misinformation. As social distancing and stay-at-home orders came into effect, many turned to social media for socializing. This increase in social media usage has made it a prime vehicle for the spreading of misinformation. This paper presents a mechanism to detect COVID-19 health-related misinformation in social media following an interdisciplinary approach. Leveraging social psychology as a foundation and existing misinformation frameworks, we defined misinformation themes and associated keywords incorporate…
Natural hazards are becoming increasingly expensive as climate change and development are exposing communities to greater risks. Preparation and recovery are critical for climate change resilience, and social media are being used more and more to communicate before, during, and after disasters. While there is a growing body of research aimed at understanding how people use social media surrounding disaster events, most existing work has focused on a single disaster case study. In the present study, we analyze five of the costliest disasters in the last decade in the United States (Hurricanes I…
We analyse a large sample of the Twitter activity developed around the social movement 'Occupy Wall Street' to study the complex interactions between the human communication activity and the semantic content of a discussion. We use a network approach based on the analysis of the bipartite graph @Users-#Hashtags and of its projections: the 'semantic network', whose nodes are hashtags, and the 'users interest network', whose nodes are users In the first instance, we find out that discussion topics (#hashtags) present a high heterogeneity, with the distinct role of the communication hubs where mo…
We study how to detect clusters in a graph defined by a stream of edges, without storing the entire graph. We extend the approach to dynamic graphs defined by the most recent edges of the stream and to several streams. The {\em content correlation }of two streams $ρ(t)$ is the Jaccard similarity of their clusters in the windows before time $t$. We propose a simple and efficient method to approximate this correlation online and show that for dynamic random graphs which follow a power law degree distribution, we can guarantee a good approximation. As an application, we follow Twitter streams and…
The analysis of the use of social media for innovative entrepreneurship in the context has received little attention in the literature, especially in the context of Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS). Therefore, this paper focuses on bridging this gap by applying text mining and sentiment analysis techniques to identify the innovative entrepreneurship reflected by these companies in their social media. Finally, we present and analyze the results of our quantitative analysis of 23.483 posts based on eleven Spanish and Italian consultancy KIBS Twitter Usernames and Keywords using data …
Censorship in social media has been well studied and provides insight into how governments stifle freedom of expression online. Comparatively less (or no) attention has been paid to detecting (self) censorship in traditional media (e.g., news) using social media as a bellweather. We present a novel unsupervised approach that views social media as a sensor to detect censorship in news media wherein statistically significant differences between information published in the news media and the correlated information published in social media are automatically identified as candidate censored event…
This paper introduces LABurst, a general technique for identifying key moments, or moments of high impact, in social media streams without the need for domain-specific information or seed keywords. We leverage machine learning to model temporal patterns around bursts in Twitter's unfiltered public sample stream and build a classifier to identify tokens experiencing these bursts. We show LABurst performs competitively with existing burst detection techniques while simultaneously providing insight into and detection of unanticipated moments. To demonstrate our approach's potential, we compare tw…
Topic lifecycle analysis on Twitter, a branch of study that investigates Twitter topics from their birth through lifecycle to death, has gained immense mainstream research popularity. In the literature, topics are often treated as one of (a) hashtags (independent from other hashtags), (b) a burst of keywords in a short time span or (c) a latent concept space captured by advanced text analysis methodologies, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The first two approaches are not capable of recognizing topics where different users use different hashtags to express the same concept (semantica…
We present in this paper a novel approach for as-you-type top-$k$ keyword search over social media. We adopt a natural "network-aware" interpretation for information relevance, by which information produced by users who are closer to the seeker is considered more relevant. In practice, this query model poses new challenges for effectiveness and efficiency in online search, even when a complete query is given as input in one keystroke. This is mainly because it requires a joint exploration of the social space and classic IR indexes such as inverted lists. We describe a memory-efficient and incr…
Institute of Industrial Science（产业技术研究所）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
Detection of emerging topics are now receiving renewed interest motivated by the rapid growth of social networks. Conventional term-frequency-based approaches may not be appropriate in this context, because the information exchanged are not only texts but also images, URLs, and videos. We focus on the social aspects of theses networks. That is, the links between users that are generated dynamically intentionally or unintentionally through replies, mentions, and retweets. We propose a probability model of the mentioning behaviour of a social network user, and propose to detect the emergence of …
Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa（阿雷基帕圣奥古斯丁国立大学）；Universidad Pablo de Olavide（巴勃罗·德·奥拉维德大学）
The Internet generates large volumes of data at a high rate, in particular, posts on social networks. Although social network data has numerous semantic adulterations, and is not intended to be a source of geo-spatial information, in the text of posts we find pieces of important information about how people relate to their environment, which can be used to identify interesting aspects of how human beings interact with portions of land based on their activities. This research proposes a methodology for the identification of land uses using Natural Language Processing (NLP) from the contents of …
Our goal is to determine the structural differences between different categories of networks and to use these differences to predict the network category. Existing work on this topic has looked at social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, co-author networks etc. We, instead, focus on a novel data set that we have assembled from a variety of sources, including law-enforcement agencies, financial institutions, commercial database providers and other similar organizations. The data set comprises networks of "persons of interest" with each network belonging to different categories such as suspect…
Due to their real time nature, microblog streams are a rich source of dynamic information, for example, about emerging events. Existing techniques for discovering such events from a microblog stream in real time (such as Twitter trending topics), have several lacunae when used for discovering emerging events; extant graph based event detection techniques are not practical in microblog settings due to their complexity; and conventional techniques, which have been developed for blogs, web-pages, etc., involving the use of keyword search, are only useful for finding information about known events…
