A longitudinal study of topic classification on Twitter
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Twitter represents a massively distributed information source over topics ranging from social and political events to entertainment and sports news. While recent work has suggested this content can be narrowed down to the personalized interests of individual users by training topic filters using standard classifiers, there remain many open questions about the efficacy of such classification-based filtering approaches. For example, over a year or more after training, how well do such classifiers generalize to future novel topical content, and are such results stable across a range of topics? In addition, how robust is a topic classifier over the time horizon,e.g., can a model trained in 1 year be used for making predictions in the subsequent year? Furthermore, what features, feature classes, and feature attributes are most critical for long-term classifier performance? To answer these questions, we collected acorpusof over 800 million English Tweetsviathe Twitter streaming API during 2013 and 2014 and learned topic classifiers for 10 diverse themes ranging from social issues to celebrity deaths to the “Iran nuclear deal”. The results of this long-term study of topic classifier performance provide a number of important insights, among them that: (i) such classifiers can indeed generalize to novel topical content with high precision over a year or more after training though performance degrades with time, (ii) the classes of hashtags and simple terms contain the most informative feature instances, (iii) removing tweets containing training hashtags from the validation set allows better generalization, and (iv) the simple volume of tweets by a user correlates more with their informativeness than their follower or friend count. In summary, this work provides a long-term study of topic classifiers on Twitter that further justifies classification-based topical filtering approaches while providing detailed insight into the feature properties most critical for topic classifier performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".