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Identifying Topical Shifts in Twitter Streams: An Integration of Non-negative Matrix Factorisation, Sentiment Analysis and Structural Break Models for Large Scale Data

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Disinformation in Open Online Media (MISDOOM 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12887))

Abstract

We propose an integration of Non-negative Matrix Factorisation, Sentiment analysis and Structural Break Models to identify significant topical shifts on the social media platform Twitter. For the topic modelling, we compare Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Non-negative Matrix Factorization in terms of their applicability to short text documents. The extraction of sentiment is done by the rule-based VADER model. Structural breaks in the relative frequency and daily sentiments of topics over time are identified with the Bai-Perron model. Combining these methods, we provide a valuable and easy to use exploratory tool for social scientists to study the discourse on Twitter over time. Detecting statistically significant shifts in topics over time enables researchers to perform statistical inference and test hypotheses about the discourse on Twitter. The framework is implemented efficiently to ensure that it can be used on average consumer hardware in a reasonable amount of time. A case study with COVID-19 related tweets in the UK is provided. Our method is validated by linking the topical shifts to real world events by the use of the timestamps of the COVID-19 related tweets.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Mattias Luber, Christoph Weisser, Benjamin Säfken, Alexander Silbersdorff, Thomas Kneib & Krisztina Kis-Katos

  2. Campus-Institut Data Science (CIDAS), Göttingen, Germany

    Christoph Weisser, Benjamin Säfken, Alexander Silbersdorff, Thomas Kneib & Krisztina Kis-Katos

Authors
  1. Mattias Luber
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  2. Christoph Weisser
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  3. Benjamin Säfken
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  4. Alexander Silbersdorff
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  6. Krisztina Kis-Katos
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christoph Weisser .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Jonathan Bright

  2. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Anastasia Giachanou

  3. University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Viktoria Spaiser

  4. Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA

    Francesca Spezzano

  5. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Anna George

  6. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Alexandra Pavliuc

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Luber, M., Weisser, C., Säfken, B., Silbersdorff, A., Kneib, T., Kis-Katos, K. (2021). Identifying Topical Shifts in Twitter Streams: An Integration of Non-negative Matrix Factorisation, Sentiment Analysis and Structural Break Models for Large Scale Data. In: Bright, J., Giachanou, A., Spaiser, V., Spezzano, F., George, A., Pavliuc, A. (eds) Disinformation in Open Online Media. MISDOOM 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12887. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87031-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87031-7_3

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-87030-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-87031-7

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