III/EAGER: TwitterStand: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff in Breaking News

Twitter是一种电子媒介，允许大量用户同时相互交流。Twitter固有的是朋友和追随者之间的不对称关系，因此在Twitter用户之间提供了一个有趣的类似社交网络的结构。推特信息被称为推文，限制在140个字符以内，因此通常非常集中。Twitter正在成为人们了解突发新闻的首选媒介。这个项目探索使用Twitter从Twitter tweets构建一个新闻处理系统。其结果类似于分布式新闻专线服务。不同之处在于撰稿人/记者的身份事先不为人所知，而且可能有很多人。推文不是按照时间表发送的。当新闻发生时，tweet就会出现，并且在通常达到高吞吐率的情况下是嘈杂的。这个探索性研究项目的目标是找到有效的方法，使Twitter成为一个有用的新闻收集机制。该项目面临的挑战包括：消除噪音；确定感兴趣的tweet集群，记住方法必须在线；并确定与tweet相关联的相关位置。本研究的广泛影响是使后期突发新闻更容易传播，并加强分布式新闻采集和报道过程。网站（http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/hjscat.html）报告了这一研究和相关研究的结果。

Twitter is an electronic medium that allows a large user populace to communicate with each other simultaneously. Inherent to Twitter is an asymmetrical relationship between friends and followers thereby provides an interesting social network-like structure among the users of Twitter. Twitter messages, called tweets, are restricted to 140 characters and thus are usually very focused. Twitter is becoming the medium of choice for keeping abreast of rapidly breaking news. This project explores the use of Twitter to build a news processing system from Twitter tweets. The result is analogous to a distributed news wire service. The difference is that the identities of the contributors/reporters are not known in advance and there may be many of them. The tweets are not sent according to a schedule. The tweets occur as news is happening and are noisy while usually arriving at a high throughput rate. The goal of this exploratory research project is to find effective methods for making Twitter a useful news gathering mechanism. Challenges addressed in this project include: removing the noise; determining tweet clusters of interest bearing in mind that the methods must be online; and determining the relevant location associated with the tweets. The broad impact of this research is to make it easier to disseminate late breaking news and enhancing the distributed news gathering and reporting process. Web site (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/hjscat.html) reports results of this and related research.