Transcript Learning to Tag

TwitterSearch
: A Comparison of Microblog Search and Web Search
Jaime Teevan, Daniel Ramage, Meredith Ringel Morris
Microsoft Research, Stanford University, Microsoft Research
WSDM’ 11
March 11 2011
Presented by Somin Kim
Outline
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Introduction
Why People Search Twitter
How People Search Twitter
What People Find on Twitter
Design Implications
Conclusion
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Introduction (1/3)
 Social networking service users share messages with their
network of friends and with the general public
 One of the most popular social networking service is Twitter
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Introduction (2/3)
 People use microblogging services like Twitter to share
information
News about
the person
posting
Location
information
Commentary
on links
Tweets
The poster’s
current mood
Directed
discussion
Any other
content …
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Introduction (3/3)
 People also use microblogging services to find information
– Some status updates are questions directed to user’s social connections
– Twitter provides a search interface to access public tweets
– Bing and Google have begun to provide online search of Twitter posts
 Different properties of contents on microblogging and web
Microblogging content
Web content
• Short
• Rich
• Generated frequently
• Generated more slowly
• Do not change after being posted • Evolve after creation
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Outline
 Introduction
 Why People Search Twitter
– Timely Information
– Social Information
– Topical Information
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How People Search Twitter
What People Find on Twitter
Design Implications
Conclusion
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Why People Search Twitter (1/4)
 We conducted a freeform questionnaire and had an structure
interview to some Twitter users at Microsoft
– “When you search Twitter, what kind of information are you looking for?”
 Behavior of Twitter users at Microsoft
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The median time of using Twitter was 1~2 years
83% read tweets at least one time per day
59% wrote tweets at least one time per day
The number of people followed was more than typical
 The mean was 370.4 and the median was 159.5
– The most popular applications were TweetDeck, Twitter, and Seesmic
– 87% experienced having searched a Twitter posts
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Why People Search Twitter (2/4)
Timely Information
 Current events
– To keep up with what was happening
– To understand trends
– Ex.
 Information related to news ( technology news, trends )
 Topics gaining popularity ( currently trending topic )
 Summaries of events colleagues were attending ( event hashtags )
 Real-time information
– Ex.
 Regional/local information ( police incident, weather, etc)
 Reports of traffic
 Status of online services
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Why People Search Twitter (3/4)
Social Information
 Information related to other Twitter users
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To find individuals with specific interests
To discover what particular individuals were saying
To understand the context of tweets that others wrote
To look for replies
 General picture of people’s overall opinions on particular topic
– To learn the community buzz
– Ex.
 Movie reviews
 Marketing campaigns
 Upcoming Microsoft event or product
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Why People Search Twitter (4/4)
Topical Information
 Information related to specific topics
– It closely matched traditional Web search motivations
– It contain themes related to timely and social information
 Information previously encountered
– But it is difficult to re-find using Twitter search
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Outline
 Introduction
 Why People Search Twitter
 How People Search Twitter
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Collecting Twitter and Web Queries
Queries Issued
Temporal Search Aspects of Search Behavior
Common Cross-Corpus Queries
 What People Find on Twitter
 Design Implications
 Conclusion
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How People Search Twitter (1/10)
Collecting Twitter and Web Queries
 Query data issued to the Twitter search engine and Web search
engine
– Sampled from the Web browser logs of the Bing toolbar
– from millions of users and includes hundreds of millions of page visits
– Collected during November 11 – 24 , 2009
 The browser logs contain query URLs associated with multiple
search engines
– It is possible to extract the queries issued to each engine from the URLs
– It is possible to associate the queries with user IDs and timestamps
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How People Search Twitter (2/10)
Collecting Twitter and Web Queries
 Twitter queries are from Twitter search engine, and Web queries
are from Bing, Google, and Yahoo
 Some queries were treated as the same query instance
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Occurred within a fifteen minute
In the same window
To the same Web search engine
With no other queries intervening
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How People Search Twitter (3/10)
Queries Issued
 Key differences between Twitter and Web query strings
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How People Search Twitter (4/10)
Queries Issued
 Web queries are navigational
 Twitter queries are temporally based or popular internet memes
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How People Search Twitter (5/10)
Queries Issued
 Celebrity Queries
– Celebrities were a popular topic among both Twitter and Web searches
– Celebrity queries issued to Twitter
 Significantly more likely to be a celebrity name
 Motivated by a desire for timely information
– Celebrity queries issued to Web
 Much more likely to include a celebrity name and additional content
 Motivated by a desire learn more about a particular aspect of some person
15.22%
14.86%
Celebrity name
6.51%
Celebrity name and additional content
3.11%
Twitter queries
Web queries
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How People Search Twitter (6/10)
Queries Issued
 Specialized syntax
– @
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As a Twitter convention, @is used to refer to a user’s alias
In Twitter queries, @ symbol usually appears at the beginning
In Web queries, @ symbol usually appears as a part of an e-mail address
@ in the body of the tweets(36%) is more common than that in Twitter queries
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As a Twitter convention, # is used in hashtags, adopted self-tag posts
In Twitter queries, # symbol usually appears at the start of a word
In Web queries, # symbol usually represents the term “number”
Many hashtags are compound words
– #
– The words in Twitter queries(7.31 characters) are on average longer than Web query
words(6.10 characters)
– @ and # can improve search success by reducing ambiguity
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How People Search Twitter (7/10)
Queries Issued
 Query popularity
– In general, Twitter queries are more consistent
 Searchers often issue queries on Twitter by clicking rather than typing
– Trending topic ( listed by the Twitter search box )
 The use of hashtags encourages query convergence
– Popular Twitter queries are much more likely to contain a hashtag
– 50.73% of the 50 most popular Twitter queries contain a hashtag
 Timely queries are popular
– Only a limited set of topics are current at any one time
 Celebrity names are popular query
– 24.92% of the 50 most popular Twitter queries contain a celebrity name
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How People Search Twitter (8/10)
Temporal Aspects of Search Behavior
 Search sessions
– Twitter session behavior often appears to involve monitoring of tweets
– Overlapping but non-duplicate queries being more common with Web search
 Re-finding
– More repeat queries overall on Twitter than on Web
 In Web search, repeat queries often lead to re-finding
 For Twitter, people use repeat queries to monitor topics over time
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How People Search Twitter (9/10)
Common Cross-Corpus Queries
 Common queries are the queries issued to both services by the
same individual
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How People Search Twitter (10/10)
Common Cross-Corpus Queries
 Queries
– Common queries were usually a succinct representation of the common
need
 Temporal aspects
– Common queries were more likely to be issued on the Web first
– Web search sessions were more likely to include related queries
– People issued common queries with roughly the same frequency on Twitter
and Web
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Outline
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Introduction
Why People Search Twitter
How People Search Twitter
What People Find on Twitter
– Collecting Twitter and Web Results
– Language Differences in Results
 Design Implications
 Conclusion
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What People Search Twitter (1/4)
Collecting Twitter and Web Results
 Twitter content returned for the queries were crawled by Twitter’s
spritzer stream for November 17-24, 2009
 Twitter search results differ from Web search results
– Twitter search results are presented to the user in the result list
– To represent the Web search results, we extracted the title and summary
text of the results
 For a better exploration of differences in Twitter and Web search
results, very common and very rare terms were filtered from each
query-specific results set
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What People Search Twitter (2/4)
Language Differences in Results
 The amount of information available following a query
– Average number of words
 In a Twitter results : 19.55
 In the Web snippets : 33.95
– Contents can be found via link
 Web snippets are associated with a Web page
 Only 34% of the Twitter results contain an external link
 Many common terms are shared, but there are differences in
search results between Tweets and Web queries
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What People Search Twitter (3/4)
Language Differences in Results
 We used LDA’s per-document
topic distributions
 Characteristics of topics on each
corpora
– Common topics
 Information semantically related
to the query
– Twitter topics
 Social chatter and current events
– Web topics
 Basic facts and navigational results
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What People Search Twitter (4/4)
Language Differences in Results
 The language of tweets is significantly different from that of the
Web results
 Web results are more topically diverse than are tweets
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Outline
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Introduction
Why People Search Twitter
How People Search Twitter
What People Find on Twitter
Design Implications
Conclusion
27/31
Design Implications (1/2)
 To suggest for the design of next-generation search tools
– Enhancing temporal queries
– Enriching people search
 Not only return the recent tweets but also top links or top stories
 Incorporate more information into Twitter and Web result pages
– Leveraging hashtags
 Social tags manually added to some sites could be automatically supplemented
with hashtags
– Employing user history
 There are many more repeat queries on Twitter, query history could be useful
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Design Implications (2/2)
 To suggest for the design of next-generation search tools (cont.)
– Providing query disambiguation
 If a query-specific Twitter topic were popular, pages matching that topic could
be ranked higher
 Tweets include questions could suggest additional information
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Outline

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
Introduction
Why People Search Twitter
How People Search Twitter
What People Find on Twitter
Design Implications
Conclusion
30/31
Conclusion
 Twitter Search vs Web Search
– People’s motivation for searching Twitter included an interest in timely
information, social information, and topical information
– Twitter queries were shorter, but contained longer words, more specialized
syntax, and more references to people
– People often used Twitter search to monitor for new content while Web
search was used to develop and learn about a topic
– Twitter results included more social content and events, while Web results
contained more facts and navigation
 We hope this understanding enables a new generation of search
tools
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