Esteem: A novel framework for qualitatively evaluating and visualizing spatiotemporal embeddings in social media

Abstract

Analyzing and visualizing large amounts of social media communications and contrasting short-term conversation changes over time and geolocations is extremely important for commercial and government applications. Earlier approaches for large-scale text stream summarization used dynamic topic models and trending words. Instead, we rely on text embeddings - low-dimensional word representations in a continuous vector space where similar words are embedded nearby each other. This paper presents ESTEEM,1 a novel tool for visualizing and evaluating spatiotemporal embeddings learned from streaming social media texts. Our tool allows users to monitor and analyze query words and their closest neighbors with an interactive interface. We used state-of-the-art techniques to learn embeddings and developed a visualization to represent dynamically changing relations between words in social media over time and other dimensions. This is the first interactive visualization of streaming text representations learned from social media texts that also allows users to contrast differences across multiple dimensions of the data.