Tweet Collect: short text message collection using automatic query expansion and classification

Abstract: The growing number of twitter users create large amounts of messages that contain valuable information for market research. These messages, called tweets, which are short, contain twitter-specific writing styles and are often idiosyncratic give rise to a vocabulary mismatch between typically chosen keywords for tweet collection and words used to describe television shows. A method is presented  that uses a new form of query expansion that generates pairs of search terms and takes into consideration the language usage of twitter to access user data that would otherwise be missed. Supervised classification, without manually annotated data, is used to maintain precision by comparing collected tweets with external sources. The method is implemented, as the Tweet Collect system, in Java utilizing many processing steps to improve performance. The evaluation was carried out by collecting tweets about five different television shows during their time of airing and indicating, on average, a 66.5% increase in the number of relevant tweets compared with using the title of the show as the search terms and 68.0% total precision. Classification gives a, slightly lower, average increase of 55.2% in number of tweets and a greatly increased 82.0% total precision. The utility of an automatic system for tracking topics that can find additional keywords is demonstrated. Implementation considerations and possible improvements are discussed that can lead to improved performance.