Detecting Information Need on Twitter

Introduction

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of multimedia content in social media networks. Research on various media sharing web sites, such as Youtube.com, Flikcr.com and Twitter.com, brings in a demand of studying how multimedia content as well as social network structure in these web sites can improve user experiences in obtaining relevant and interesting information. One of the key differences between these social media networks and traditional multimedia databases is that in social media the content is generated, shared and viewed based on a variety of needs from the users in social relations. The user's need such as need to share information, determines his/her behaviors in social network. Since the huge amount of social media content generated by users lies in all kinds of areas and qualities, it would be very difficult for users to get what they actually want. Fulfilling such information need would therefore make the best use of the social media content and eventually boost the user's activity and the scale of social media network. Therefore, techniques of detecting user's information need and making relevant recommendation have a long-term meaning for studies and developing of social media.

tweets showing information need

In social media, the variety of needs determines the user's behaviors such as uploading content, sharing ideas, making comments or searching for specific contents. In every day life, we can see such need appears frequently, such as the need to know the news in the day, specials of restaurants, or some suggestions for job interviews, etc. Since social media is generated by users, such needs can be easily found. Take twitter as an example, if a user need to know some information, he/she would probably tweets, follows somebody who may has the information, or search from tweets of others. Based on how we can find the user's information need, we could roughly categorized the information need into explicit and implicit information need. The Explicit Information Need is the need that user expresses out directly, from which we can detect. We could not detect the implicit information need, which is what user has but not directly expresses out. For instance, a user wants to find some suggestions on the dinner special of a restaurant near his/her house. One possible way is to publish a tweets on twitter asking for advices, and waiting for other users to provide the information. The another approach is to search on the tweets or follow the twitter account of the people related to the restaurant. The user's behavior of tweeting shows his/her explicit information need, while the user's behavior of following or searching shows his/her implicit information need. Comparing to implicit information need, the explicit information need is possible to discover. In order to fulfill the needs of users, detecting such needs will be our first and essential task. In this project, we use the term information need to denote explicit information need.

Information Need in social media(Twitter)

Labeling Data

Presentations and Status Reports