Skip to main content

Information Extraction from Social Media: A Hands-On Tutorial on Tasks, Data, and Open Source Tools

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2022)

Abstract

Information extraction (IE) is a common sub-area of natural language processing that focuses on identifying structured data from unstructured data. The community of Information Retrieval (IR) relies on accurate and high-performance IE to be able to retrieve high quality results from massive datasets. One example of IE is to identify named entities in a text, e.g., “Barack Obama served as the president of the USA”. Here, Barack Obama and USA are named entities of types of PERSON and LOCATION, respectively. Another example is to identify sentiment expressed in a text, e.g., “This movie was awesome”. Here, the sentiment expressed is positive. Finally, identifying various linguistic aspects of a text, e.g., part of speech tags, noun phrases, dependency parses, etc., which can serve as features for additional IE tasks. This tutorial introduces participants to a) the usage of Python based, open-source tools that support IE from social media data (mainly Twitter), and b) best practices for ensuring the reproducibility of research. Participants will learn and practice various semantic and syntactic IE techniques that are commonly used for analyzing tweets. Additionally, participants will be familiarized with the landscape of publicly available tweet data, and methods for collecting and preparing them for analysis. Finally, participants will be trained to use a suite of open source tools (SAIL for active learning, TwitterNER for named entity recognition3, and SocialMediaIE for multi task learning), which utilize advanced machine learning techniques (e.g., deep learning, active learning with human-in-the-loop, multi-lingual, and multi-task learning) to perform IE on their own or existing datasets. Participants will also learn how social context can be integrated in Information Extraction systems to make them better. The tools introduced in the tutorial will focus on the three main stages of IE, namely, collection of data (including annotation), data processing and analytics, and visualization of the extracted information. More details can be found at: https://socialmediaie.github.io/tutorials/.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 89.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Addawood, A., Rezapour, R., Mishra, S., Schneider, J., Diesner, J.: Developing an information source lexicon. In: Prioritising Online Content Workshop Co-located at NIPS (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Collier, D., Mishra, S., Houston, D., Hensley, B., Mitchell, S., Hartlep, N.: Who is most likely to oppose federal tuition-free college policies? Investigating variable interactions of sentiments to America’s college promise. SSRN Electron. J. (2019). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3423054

  3. Collier, D.A., Mishra, S., Houston, D.A., Hensley, B.O., Hartlep, N.D.: Americans ‘support’ the idea of tuition-free college: an exploration of sentiment and political identity signals otherwise. J. Furth. High. Educ. 43(3), 347–362 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877X.2017.1361516

  4. Diesner, J., Carley, K.M.: Relation extraction from texts (in German: Extraktion relationaler Daten aus Texten). In: Stegbauer, C., Häußling, R. (eds.) Handbook network research (Handbuch Netzwerkforschung), pp. 507–521. VS Verlag (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Diesner, J., Kumaraguru, P., Carley, K.M.: Mental models of data privacy and security extracted from interviews with Indians. In: Proceedings of 55th Annual Conference of International Communication Association (ICA). New York, NY (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Diesner, J., Chin, C.L.: Usable ethics: practical considerations for responsibly conducting research with social trace data. In: Proceedings of Beyond IRBs: Ethical Review Processes for Big Data Research (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Diesner, J., Chin, C.L.: Seeing the forest for the trees: considering applicable types of regulation for the responsible collection and analysis of human centered data. In: Human-Centered Data Science (HCDS) Workshop at 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Eisenstein, J.: What to do about bad language on the internet. In: Proceedings of the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp. 359–369. Association for Computational Linguistics, Atlanta, Georgia (June 2013)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Han, K., Yang, P., Mishra, S., Diesner, J.: WikiCSSH: extracting computer science subject headings from Wikipedia. In: Workshop on Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKG 2020) (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Hutto, C.J., Gilbert, E.: Vader: A parsimonious rule-based model for sentiment analysis of social media text. In: International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Kaplan, A.M., Haenlein, M.: Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media. Bus. Horiz. 53(1), 59–68 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2009.09.003

  12. Kosinski, M., Matz, S.C., Gosling, S.D., Popov, V., Stillwell, D.: Facebook as a research tool for the social sciences: opportunities, challenges, ethical considerations, and practical guidelines. Am. Psychol. 70(6), 543–556 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039210

  13. Kulkarni, V., Mishra, S., Haghighi, A.: LMSOC: an approach for socially sensitive pretraining. In: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pp. 2967–2975. Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg, PA, USA (November 2021). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.254

  14. Kwak, H., Lee, C., Park, H., Moon, S.: What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? In: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web–WWW 2010, p. 591. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA (April 2010). https://doi.org/10.1145/1772690.1772751

  15. Mishra, S.: SCTG: social communications temporal graph - a novel approach to visualize temporal communication graphs from social data. In: UIUC Data Science Day (October 2017)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Mishra, S.: Multi-dataset-multi-task neural sequence tagging for information extraction from tweets. In: Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media - HT 2019, pp. 283–284. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3342220.3344929

  17. Mishra, S.: Information extraction from digital social trace data with applications to social media and scholarly communication data. ACM SIGIR Forum 54(1), 1–2 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1145/3451964.3451981

  18. Mishra, S.: Information Extraction from Digital Social Trace Data with Applications to Social Media and Scholarly Communication Data. Ph.D. thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Mishra, S.: Non-neural structured prediction for event detection from news in Indian languages. In: Mehta, P., Mandl, T., Majumder, P., Mitra, M. (eds.) Working Notes of FIRE 2020–Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, Hyderabad, India (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Mishra, S., Agarwal, S., Guo, J., Phelps, K., Picco, J., Diesner, J.: Enthusiasm and support: alternative sentiment classification for social movements on social media. In: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science - WebSci 2014, pp. 261–262. ACM Press, Bloomington, Indiana, USA (June 2014). https://doi.org/10.1145/2615569.2615667

  21. Mishra, S., Collier, D.: A framework for generating annotated social media corpora with demographics, stance, civility, and topicality. SSRN Electron. J. (2020). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3757554

  22. Mishra, S., Diesner, J.: Semi-supervised named entity recognition in noisy-text. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (WNUT), pp. 203–212. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee, Osaka, Japan (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Mishra, S., Diesner, J.: Detecting the correlation between sentiment and user-level as well as text-level meta-data from benchmark corpora. In: Proceedings of the 29th on Hypertext and Social Media - HT 2018, pp. 2–10. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA (2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3209542.3209562

  24. Mishra, S., Diesner, J.: Capturing signals of enthusiasm and support towards social issues from Twitter. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Social Media World Sensors - SIdEWayS 2019, pp. 19–24. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3345645.3351104

  25. Mishra, S., Diesner, J., Byrne, J., Surbeck, E.: Sentiment analysis with incremental human-in-the-loop learning and lexical resource customization. In: Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media - HT 2015, pp. 323–325. ACM Press, New York, New York, USA (2015). https://doi.org/10.1145/2700171.2791022

  26. Mishra, S., Haghighi, A.: Improved multilingual language model pretraining for social media text via translation pair prediction. In: Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2021), pp. 381–388. Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg, PA, USA (November 2021). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.wnut-1.42

  27. Mishra, S., He, S., Belli, L.: Assessing demographic bias in named entity recognition. In: Bias in Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction–A Workshop at AKBC 2020 (August 2020)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Mishra, S., Mishra, S.: 3Idiots at HASOC 2019: fine-tuning transformer neural networks for hate speech identification in Indo-European languages. In: Proceedings of the 11th Annual Meeting of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation, pp. 208–213. Kolkata, India (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Mishra, S., Mishra, S.: Scubed at 3C task a–a simple baseline for citation context purpose classification. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications, pp. 59–64. Association for Computational Linguistics, Wuhan, China (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Mishra, S., Mishra, S.: Scubed at 3C task b–a simple baseline for citation context influence classification. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications, pp. 65–70. Association for Computational Linguistics, Wuhan, China (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Mishra, S., Prasad, S., Mishra, S.: Multilingual joint fine-tuning of transformer models for identifying trolling, aggression and cyberbullying at TRAC 2020. In: Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying, pp. 120–125. European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Marseille, France (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Mishra, S., Prasad, S., Mishra, S.: Exploring multi-task multi-lingual learning of transformer models for hate speech and offensive speech identification in social media. SN Comput. Sci. 2(2), 1–19 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-021-00455-5

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Mohammad, S.M., Kiritchenko, S., Zhu, X.: NRC-Canada: building the state-of-the-art in sentiment analysis of tweets. In: Second Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM), Volume 2: Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2013), vol. 2, pp. 321–327. Association for Computational Linguistics, Atlanta, Georgia, USA (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Pang, B., Lee, L.: Opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Found. Trends® Inf. Retr. 2(1–2), 1–135 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1561/1500000011

  35. Rezapour, R., Dinh, L., Diesner, J.: Incorporating the measurement of moral foundations theory into analyzing stances on controversial topics. In: Proceedings of the 32st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, pp. 177–188. ACM, New York, NY, USA (August 2021). https://doi.org/10.1145/3465336.3475112

  36. Rezapour, R., Shah, S.H., Diesner, J.: Enhancing the measurement of social effects by capturing morality. In: Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pp. 35–45. Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg, PA, USA (2019). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W19-1305

  37. Rezapour, R., Wang, L., Abdar, O., Diesner, J.: Identifying the overlap between election result and candidates’ ranking based on hashtag-enhanced, lexicon-based sentiment analysis. In: 2017 IEEE 11th International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC), pp. 93–96. IEEE (2017). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSC.2017.92

  38. Sarawagi, S.: Information extraction. Found. Trends® Databases 1(3), 261–377 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1561/1900000003

  39. Sarol, M.J., Dinh, L., Rezapour, R., Chin, C.L., Yang, P., Diesner, J.: An empirical methodology for detecting and prioritizing needs during crisis events. In: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pp. 4102–4107. Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg, PA, USA (2020). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.366

  40. Schwartz, H.A., et al.: Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: the open-vocabulary approach. PLoS ONE 8(9), e73791 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0073791

  41. Yee, K., Tantipongpipat, U., Mishra, S.: Image cropping on twitter: fairness metrics, their limitations, and the importance of representation, design, and agency. Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact. 5(CSCW2), 1–24 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1145/3479594

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shubhanshu Mishra .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Mishra, S., Rezapour, R., Diesner, J. (2022). Information Extraction from Social Media: A Hands-On Tutorial on Tasks, Data, and Open Source Tools. In: Hagen, M., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13186. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99739-7_74

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99739-7_74

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-99738-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-99739-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics