Towards a language independent Twitter bot detector
Jonas Lundberg, Jonas Nordqvist, Mikko Laitinen · Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publications · 2019
This article describes our work in developing an application that recognizes automatically generated tweets. The objective of this machine learning application is to increase data accuracy in sociolinguistic studies that utilize Twitter by reducing skewed sampling and inaccuracies in linguistic data. Most previous machine learning attempts to exclude bot material have been language dependent since they make use of monolingual Twitter text in their training phase. In this paper, we present a language independent approach which classifies each single tweet to be either autogenerated (AGT) or human-generated (HGT). We define an AGT as a tweet where all or parts of the natural language content is generated automatically by a bot or other type of program. In other words, while AGT/HGT refer to an individual message, the term bot refers to non-personal and automated accounts that post content to online social networks. Our approach classifies a tweet using only metadata that comes with every tweet, and we utilize those metadata parameters that are both language and country independent. The empirical part shows good success rates. Using a bilingual training set of Finnish and Swedish tweets, we correctly classified about 98.2% of all tweets in a test set using a third language (English)