Short news item: Computer analysis of linguistic cues in tweets

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Title: How Twitter Can Cash In with New Technology
Subtitle: Twitter seeks to do better at inferring its users’ consumer
and political preferences, gender, age, and more.
Author: David Talbot
Date: September 18, 2013
Website: Technology Review

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/519321/how-twitter-can-cash-in-with-new-technology/

[Begin excerpt]
Natural-language processing gets better all the time. Hundreds of
markers—word choices, abbreviations, slang terms, and letter and
punctuation combinations—signify ever-finer strata of demographic
groups and their interests.

Some things, like political leanings, are often not hard to figure out
from the right hashtags or from sentiments associated with terms like
“Obamacare,” says Dan Weld, a computer scientist at the University of
Washington.

Meanwhile, Derek Ruths, a computer scientist who explores
natural-language processing at McGill University, has recently shown
that linguistic cues can identify U.S. Twitter users’ political
orientation with 70 to 90 percent accuracy and can even identify their
age (within five years) with 80 percent accuracy. For example, words
that most strongly suggest someone is between the ages of 25 and 30
include “for,” “on”, “photo,” “I’m,” and “just,” he says. Generally,
these users have a somewhat stronger allegiance to grammar than
younger, slang-loving users, he says. And as with location, the
profiles of the people they follow provide clues to their
demographics.
[End excerpt]

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