Information filtering method for twitter streaming data using human-in-the-loop machine learning

Abstract

There are a massive amount of texts on social media. However, only a small portion of these texts is informative for a specific purpose. If we accurately filter the texts in the streams, we can obtain useful information in real time. In a keyword-based approach, filters are constructed using keywords, but selecting the appropriate keywords to include is often difficult. In this work, we propose a method for filtering texts that are related to specific topics using both crowdsourcing and machine learning based text classification method. In our approach, we construct a text classifier using FastText and then annotate whether the tweets are related to the topics using crowdsourcing. In this step, we consider two strategies, optimistic and pessimistic approach, for selecting tweets which should be assessed. Then, we reconstruct the text classifier using the annotated texts and classify them again. We assume that if we continue instigating this loop, the accuracy of the classifier will improve, and we will obtain useful information without having to specify keywords. Experimental results demonstrated that our proposed system is effective for filtering social media streams. Moreover, we confirmed that the pessimistic approach is better than the optimistic approach.