An empirical study on learning to rank of tweets

  • Authors:
  • Yajuan Duan;Long Jiang;Tao Qin;Ming Zhou;Heung-Yeung Shum

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Science and Technology of China;Microsoft Research Asia;Microsoft Research Asia;Microsoft Research Asia;Microsoft Research Asia

  • Venue:
  • COLING '10 Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Twitter, as one of the most popular micro-blogging services, provides large quantities of fresh information including real-time news, comments, conversation, pointless babble and advertisements. Twitter presents tweets in chronological order. Recently, Twitter introduced a new ranking strategy that considers popularity of tweets in terms of number of retweets. This ranking method, however, has not taken into account content relevance or the twitter account. Therefore a large amount of pointless tweets inevitably flood the relevant tweets. This paper proposes a new ranking strategy which uses not only the content relevance of a tweet, but also the account authority and tweet-specific features such as whether a URL link is included in the tweet. We employ learning to rank algorithms to determine the best set of features with a series of experiments. It is demonstrated that whether a tweet contains URL or not, length of tweet and account authority are the best conjunction.