Detecting Social Roles in Twitter

For social media analysts or social scientists interested in better understanding an audience or demographic cohort, being able to group social media content by demographic characteristics is a useful mechanism to organise data. Social roles are one particular demographic characteristic, which includes work, recreational, community and familial roles. In our work, we look at the task of detecting social roles from English Twitter profiles. We create a new annotated dataset for this task. The dataset includes approximately 1,000 Twitter profiles annotated with social roles. We also describe a machine learning approach for detecting social roles from Twitter profiles, which can act as a strong baseline for this dataset. Finally, we release a set of word clusters obtained in an unsupervised manner from Twitter profiles. These clusters may be useful for other natural language processing tasks in social media.