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Published in: KI - Künstliche Intelligenz 1/2013

01-02-2013 | Technical Contribution

Learning to Discover Political Activism in the Twitterverse

Authors: Samantha Finn, Eni Mustafaraj

Published in: KI - Künstliche Intelligenz | Issue 1/2013

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Abstract

When analysing social media conversations, in search of the public opinion about an unfolding political event that is being discussed in real-time (e.g., presidential debates, major speeches, etc.), it is important to distinguish between two groups of participants: political activists and the general public. To address this problem, we propose a supervised machine-learning approach, which uses inexpensively acquired labeled data from mono-thematic Twitter accounts to learn a binary classifier for the labels “political activist” and “general public”. While the classifier has a 92 % accuracy on individual tweets, when applied to the last 200 tweets from accounts of a set of 1000 Twitter users, it classifies accounts with a 97 % accuracy. Our work demonstrates that machine learning algorithms can play a critical role in improving the quality of social media analytics and understanding, whose importance is increasing as social media adoption becomes widespread.

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Footnotes
1
In 2008, Twitter was not yet very popular. Its adoption increased significantly around March 2009 when celebrities such as Oprah started publicizing it in the media.
 
2
As of October 2, 2012.
 
4
A list can be found at tweetcongress.​com.
 
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Metadata
Title
Learning to Discover Political Activism in the Twitterverse
Authors
Samantha Finn
Eni Mustafaraj
Publication date
01-02-2013
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Published in
KI - Künstliche Intelligenz / Issue 1/2013
Print ISSN: 0933-1875
Electronic ISSN: 1610-1987
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-012-0227-y

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