Extracting actionable information from microtexts
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Microblogs such as Twitter represent a powerful source of information. Part of this information can be aggregated beyond the level of individual posts. Some of this aggregated information is referring to events that could or should be acted upon in the interest of e-governance, public safety, or other levels of public interest. Moreover, a significant amount of this information, if aggregated, could complement existing information networks in a non-trivial way. This dissertation proposes a semi-automatic method for extracting actionable information that serves this purpose. First, we show that predicting time to event is possible for both in-domain and cross-domain scenarios. Second, we suggest a method which facilitates the definition of relevance for an analyst's context and the use of this definition to analyze new data. Finally, we propose a method to integrate the machine learning based relevant information classification method with a rule-based information classification technique to classify microtexts. Fully automatizing microtext analysis has been our goal since the first day of this research project. Our efforts in this direction informed us about the extent this automation can be realized. We mostly first developed an automated approach, then we extended and improved it by integrating human intervention at various steps of the automated approach. Our experience confirms previous work that states that a well-designed human intervention or contribution in design, realization, or evaluation of an information system either improves its performance or enables its realization. As our studies and results directed us toward its necessity and value, we were inspired from previous studies in designing human involvement and customized our approaches to benefit from human input.
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