Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
services ranging from
Tumblr
2
to
Plurk
,
3
and the most popular of all, as indicated
above, is
Twitter
.
4
2.2.2 Twitter
Twitter is a popular micro-blogging tool which has taken big steps since the date
of establishment in October 2006. As the popularity of micro-blogs grows among
Internet users, the interests of academics on micro-blogs grow accordingly. The high
number of micro-blog posts enables researchers to specialize and focus on different
research areas. Because micro-blogging is a new concept, the studies and research
on the matter is new as well.
In Twitter, posts, or in Twitter jargon “tweets,” are confined to 140 characters. The
posts can consist of plain texts, links, and keywords that possess a special meaning in
Twitter such as hashtags, mentions, and retweets. Hashtags are single word tokens,
which follow the hash symbol, '#'. They can appear anywhere in a tweet, and they are
used to tag a tweet, and a tweet can only be hash tagged by its author. Mentions, on the
other hand, are the user names used in Twitter, which go after an “at” symbol, '@'.
A user in Twitter can use the pattern '@
' in order to address another
user. Retweets are used when a user wants to spread a tweet published by another
user. To underline that a tweet is a repeat (re-tweet) of another tweet, users write RT
in their tweets.
<
username
>
2.2.3 Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing (NLP) can be described as a subtitle of computer sci-
ence, which deals with languages and uses Machine Learning techniques to process
human language.
NLP incorporates many subfields and tasks some of which are automatic summa-
rization, discourse analysis, machine translation, relationship extraction, and answer-
ing questions. The improvement of these fields has positive repercussion on the
developments of many other areas in different fields.
The studies on NLP commenced as early as the 1940s. The very first application
of NLP could be observed as a Machine Translation application developed during
the World War II in order to break codes. In 1950, a criterion of intelligence was
suggested by Alan Turing, which in present time is referred as the “Turing test” [
32
].
With this criterion, computers were rendered able to imitate a person in a conversation
with a human judge.
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