Corpus Considerations Sample Clauses

Corpus Considerations. Twitter is a social media outlet composed of short microblogs, each under 140 characters. Unlike Facebook, a user on Twitter can follow any other user’s activity on the site [38]. Only if a user specifically opts-out of a public profile is there a mechanic similar to friend requests on Facebook. Though this seems like a minute difference, it changes the dynamics of user interaction and behavior on the networks [18]. Processing statuses from Twitter also poses some challenges. The language used in tweets is informal and the structure of each post is often misconstructed. There are several platform specific features – re-tweets, at-replies, etc – which must be accounted for. [30]. For example, researchers must decide whether to remove the re-xtweet identifier RT, non-ASCII characters, and hashtags. Though each of these unique characteristics of a tweet might require extra effort on the part of the researcher, they also add potential value if used as meta-information [38, 54, 61]. For example, Xxxxxxx et al (2011) found that re-tweeting is a politically polarizing activity but at-mentioning users in a tweet is not [27]. Sentiment may be hard to discern because a lot of information and likely various sentiments are expressed in a relatively compressed message [15]. However, there are some advantage in using twitter data. Tweets often include emoji chosen by users. Emoji can be thought of as a source of sentiment annotation [44]. The emoji serves as a visual representation of the user’s intent which could help label messages as sarcastic or ironic, challenging feats for NLP [13, 28]. Hashtags and user tagging could also provide an immediate characterization of topics or ideas discussed in the tweet [27]. Additionally, Twitter data are extremely accessible, since tweets can be pulled from the API much easier than, for example, trying to scrape comments and blogs from across the Internet to gauge public sentiment. Therefore, although Twitter data pose some challenges, they have recently been used as measures of public opinion due to their many advantages [57, 45].