How to Stay Up-To-Date on Twitter With General Keywords.
Mandy Roick, Maximilian Jenders, Ralf Krestel · LWA · 2015
Microblogging platforms make it easy for users to share information through the publication of short personal messages. However, users are not only interested in sharing, but even more so in consuming information. As a result, they are confronted with new challenges when it comes to retrieving information on microblogging platforms. In this paper we present a query expansion method based on latent topics to support users interested in topical information. Similar to news aggregator sites, our approach identifies subtopics to a given query and provides the user with a quick overview of discussed topics within the microblogging platform. Using a document collection of microblog posts from Twitter, we compare the quality of search results returned by our algorithm with a baseline approach and a state-of-the-art microblog-specific query expansion method. We introduce a novel, innovative semi-supervised evaluation strategy based on expert Twitter users. In contrast to existing query expansion methods, our approach can be used to aggregate and visualize topical query results based on the calculated topic models, while achieving competitive results for traditional keyword-based search. 1 Searching Microblog Posts Along with the development of Web 2.0, users have increasingly become content providers. A good example of this trend are microblogging platforms. These platforms allow users to share short text messages, images, or links with interested observers (followers) [5]. Microblogging platforms, such as Facebook, Tumblr, or Twitter, report constantly increasing numbers of users. According to Twitter’s website, e.g., the platform has 284 million active users monthly and 500 million shared microblog posts daily, averaging 6,000 tweets per second. However, not all of Twitter’s users share content. 44% of the users have never posted anything1. These users are only interested in consuming content, thus filtering and searching microblog posts becomes an increasingly important task. Copyright © 2015 by the paper’s authors. Copying permitted only for private and academic purposes. In: R. Bergmann, S. Gorg, G. Muller (Eds.): Proceedings of the LWA 2015 Workshops: KDML, FGWM, IR, and FGDB. Trier, Germany, 7.–9. October 2015, published at http://ceur-ws.org 1 Digital Insights http://blog.digitalinsights.in/social-media-users-2014-stats-numbers/