Semi-supervised labeling: a proposed methodology for labeling the twitter datasets

Abstract

Twitter has nowadays become a trending microblogging and social media platform for news and discussions. Since the dramatic increase in its platform has additionally set off a dramatic increase in spam utilization in this platform. For Supervised machine learning, one always finds a need to have a labeled dataset of Twitter. It is desirable to design a semi-supervised labeling technique for labeling newly prepared recent datasets. To prepare the labeled dataset lot of human affords are required. This issue has motivated us to propose an efficient approach for preparing labeled datasets so that time can be saved and human errors can be avoided. Our proposed approach relies on readily available features in real-time for better performance and wider applicability. This work aims at collecting the most recent tweets of a user using Twitter streaming and prepare a recent dataset of Twitter. Finally, a semi-supervised machine learning algorithm based on the self-training technique was designed for labeling the tweets. Semi-supervised support vector machine and semi-supervised decision tree classifiers were used as base classifiers in the self-training technique. Further, the authors have applied K means clustering algorithm to the tweets based on the tweet content. The principled novel approach is an ensemble of semi-supervised and unsupervised learning wherein it was found that semi-supervised algorithms are more accurate in prediction than unsupervised ones. To effectively assign the labels to the tweets, authors have implemented the concept of voting in this novel approach and the label pre-directed by the majority voting classifier is the actual label assigned to the tweet dataset. Maximum accuracy of 99.0% has been reported in this paper using a majority voting classifier for spam labeling.