Natural Language Processing for Social Media. Diana Inkpen
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to the analyst for preferential inclusion also lead us to domain-based applications in computational linguistics.
1.2.1 CROSS-LANGUAGE DOCUMENT ANALYSIS IN SOCIAL MEDIA DATA
The application of existing NLP techniques to social media from different languages and multiple resources faces several additional challenges; the tools for text analysis are typically designed for specific languages. The main research issue therefore lies in assessing whether language-independence or language-specificity is to be preferred. Users publish content not only in English, but in a multitude of languages. This means that due to the language barrier, many users cannot access all available content. The use of machine translation technology can help bridge the language gap in such situations. The integration of machine translation and NLP tools opens opportunities for the semantic analysis of text via cross-language processing.
1.2.2 REAL-WORLD APPLICATIONS
The huge volume of publicly available information on social networks and on the Web can benefit different areas such as industry, media, healthcare, politics, public safety, and security. Here, we can name a few innovative integrations for social media monitoring, and some model scenarios of government-user applications in coordination and situational awareness. We will show how NLP tools can help governments interpret data in near real-time and provide enhanced command decision at the strategic and operational levels.
Industry
There is great interest on the part of industry in social media data monitoring. Social media data can dramatically improve business intelligence (BI). Businesses could achieve several goals by integrating social data into their corporate BI systems, such as branding and awareness, customer/prospect engagement, and improving customer service. Online marketing, stock market prediction, product recommendation, and reputation management are some examples of real-world applications for SASM.
Media and Journalism
The relationship between journalists and the public became closer thanks to social networking platforms. The recent statistics, published by a 2013 social journalism study, show that 25% of major information sources come from social media data.3 The public relations professionals and journalists use the power of social media to gather the public opinion, perform sentiment analysis, implement crisis monitoring, perform issues- or program-based media analysis, and survey social media.
Healthcare
Over time, social media became part of common healthcare. The healthcare industry uses social media tools for building community engagement and fostering better relationships with their clients. The use of Twitter to discuss recommendations for providers and consumers (patients, families, or caregivers), ailments, treatments, and medication is only one example of social media in healthcare. This was initially referred to as social health. Medical forums appeared due to the needs of the patients to discuss their feelings and experiences.
This book will discuss how NLP methods on social media data can help develop innovative tools and integrate appropriate linguistic information in order to allow better health monitoring (such as disease spread) or availability of information and support for patients.
Politics
Online monitoring can help keep track of mentions made by citizens across the country and of international, national, or local opinion about political parties. For a political party, organizing an election campaign and gaining followers is crucial. Opinion mining, awareness of comments and public posts, and understanding statements made on discussion forums can give political parties a chance to get a better idea of the reality of a specific event, and to take the necessary steps to improve their positions.
Defense and Security
Defense and security organizations are greatly interested in studying these sources of information and summaries to understand situations and perform sentiment analysis of a group of individuals with common interests, and also to be alerted against potential threats to defense and public safety. In this book, we will discuss the issue of information flow from social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Skyblog, and Twitter. We will present methods for information extraction in Web 2.0 to find links between data entities, and to analyze the characteristics and dynamism of networks through which organizations and discussions evolve. Social data often contain significant information hidden in the texts and network structure. Aggregate social behavior can provide valuable information for the sake of national security.
1.3 CHALLENGES IN SOCIAL MEDIA DATA
The information presented in social media, such as online discussion forums, blogs, and Twitter posts, is highly dynamic and involves interaction among various participants. There is a huge amount of text continuously generated by users in informal environments.
Standard NLP methods applied to social media texts are therefore confronted with difficulties due to non-standard spelling, noise, and limited sets of features for automatic clustering and classification. Social media are important because the use of social networks has made everybody a potential author, so the language is now closer to the user than to any prescribed norms [Beverungen and Kalita, 2011, Zhou and Hovy, 2006]. Blogs, tweets, and status updates are written in an informal, conversational tone—often more of a “stream of consciousness” than the carefully thought out and meticulously edited work that might be expected in traditional print media. This informal nature of social media texts presents new challenges to all levels of automatic language processing.
At the surface level, several issues pose challenges to basic NLP tools developed for traditional data. Inconsistent (or absent) punctuation and capitalization can make detection of sentence boundaries quite difficult—sometimes even for human readers, as in the following tweet: “#qcpoli enjoyed a hearty laugh today with #plq debate audience for @jflisee #notrehome tune was that the intended reaction?” Emoticons, incorrect or non-standard spelling, and rampant abbreviations complicate tokenization and part-of-speech tagging, among other tasks. Traditional tools must be adapted to consider new variations such as letter repetition (“heyyyyyy”), which are different from common spelling errors. Grammaticality, or frequent lack thereof, is another concern for any syntactic analyses of social media texts, where fragments can be as commonplace as actual full sentences, and the choice between “there,” “they are,” “they’re,” and “their” can seem to be made at random.
Social media are also much noisier than traditional print media. Like much else on the Internet, social networks are plagued with spam, ads, and all manner of other unsolicited, irrelevant, or distracting content. Even by ignoring these forms of noise, much of the genuine, legitimate content on social media can be seen as irrelevant with respect to most information needs. André et al. [2012] demonstrate this in a study that assesses user-perceived value of tweets. They collected over 40,000 ratings of tweets from followers, in which only 36% of tweets were rated as “worth reading,” while 25% were rated as “not worth reading.” The least valued tweets were so-called presence maintenance posts (e.g., “Hullo twitter!”). Pre-processing to filter out spam and other irrelevant content, or models that are better capable of coping with noise are essential in any language-processing effort targeting social media.
Several characteristics of social media text are of particular concern to NLP approaches. The particularities of a given medium and the way in which that medium is used can have a profound effect on what constitutes a successful summarization approach. For example, the 140-character limit imposed on Twitter posts makes for individual tweets that are rather contextually impoverished compared to more traditional documents. However, redundancy can become a problem over multiple tweets, due in part to the practice of retweeting posts. Sharifi et al. [2010] note the redundancy of information as a major issue with microblog summarization in their experiments with data mining techniques to automatically create summary posts of Twitter trending topics.
A major challenge facing detection of events of interest from multiple Twitter streams is therefore to separate the mundane and polluted information from interesting real-world events. In