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，从而在Twitter的用户中提供了一种有趣的社交网络式结构。Twitter消息被称为tweet，被限制在140个字符以内，因此通常非常集中。Twitter正在成为跟上最新突发新闻的首选媒体。这个项目探索了如何使用Twitter来构建一个从Twitter推文中处理新闻的系统。其结果类似于分布式新闻通讯社。不同的是，撰稿人/记者的身份事先不知道，可能有很多人。这些推文不是按照时间表发送的。这些推文是在新闻发生时发出的，而且噪音很大，而且通常会以高吞吐速率到达。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。该项目处理的挑战包括：消除噪音；确定感兴趣的推文群组，同时铭记这些方法必须在线；以及确定与推文相关的位置。这项研究的广泛影响是使传播最新突发新闻变得更容易，并加强了分布式新闻收集和报道过程。网站(http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/hjscat.html)报道了这项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.