Summarization of Twitter Microblogs

Twitter1, the microblog site started in 2006, has become a social phenomenon. More than 340 million Tweets are sent out every day2. While a majority of posts are conversational or not particularly meaningful, about 3.6% of the posts concern topics of mainstream news3. Twitter has been credited with providing the most current news about many important events before traditional media, such as the attacks in Mumbai in November 2008. Twitter also played a prominent role in the unfolding of the troubles in Iran in 2009 subsequent to a disputed election, and the so-called Twitter Revolutions4 in Tunisia and Egypt in 2010-11. To help people who read Twitter posts or tweets, Twitter provides two interesting features: an API that allows users to search for posts that contain a topic phrase and a short list of popular topics called Trending Topics. A user can perform a search for a topic and retrieve a list of most recent posts that contain the topic phrase. The di culty in interpreting the results is that the returned posts are only sorted by recency, not relevancy. Therefore, the user is forced to manually read through the posts in order to understand what users are primarily saying about a particular topic. A website called WhatTheTrend5 attempts to provide definitions of trending topics by allowing users to manually enter descriptions of why a topic is trending. Here is an example of a definition from WhatTheTrend: