Understanding climate change tweets: an open source toolkit for social media analysis
Authors
Diana Maynard, Kalina Bontcheva
Corresponding Author
Diana Maynard
Available Online September 2015.
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.2991/ict4s-env-15.2015.28How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- social media analysis; environmental term extraction; climate change; Natural Language Processing; semantic search; Linked Open Data
- Abstract
- Collective awareness about climate change is an ongoing problem because there is such a wealth of information available, which can be confusing, contradictory and difficult to interpret. In order to help citizens understand environmental concerns, and to help organisations better inform and target interested people with campaigns, we have developed an open source toolkit to analyse social media data on the topic of climate change. The toolkit comprises methods for extracting, aggregating, and visualising actionable knowledge, based on automatic analysis of large volumes of text. The key terms, topics and sentiments expressed in online discussions are extracted, along with key indicators of climate change, and are stored in a semantic search tool, which enables complex searches over the huge volumes of data. We describe a scenario using the toolkit to gain insights from a large collection of political tweets, showing how we can analyse this dataset for understanding engagement of the public with respect to the topic of climate change.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Diana Maynard AU - Kalina Bontcheva PY - 2015/09 DA - 2015/09 TI - Understanding climate change tweets: an open source toolkit for social media analysis BT - EnviroInfo and ICT for Sustainability 2015 PB - Atlantis Press SP - 242 EP - 250 SN - 2352-538X UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/ict4s-env-15.2015.28 DO - https://doi.org/10.2991/ict4s-env-15.2015.28 ID - Maynard2015/09 ER -