Twitter-Demographer: A Flow-based Tool to Enrich Twitter Data

Federico Bianchi, Vincenzo Cutrona, Dirk Hovy


Abstract
Twitter data have become essential to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and social science research, driving various scientific discoveries in recent years. However, the textual data alone are often not enough to conduct studies: especially, social scientists need more variables to perform their analysis and control for various factors. How we augment this information, such as users’ location, age, or tweet sentiment, has ramifications for anonymity and reproducibility, and requires dedicated effort. This paper describes Twitter-Demographer, a simple, flow-based tool to enrich Twitter data with additional information about tweets and users. \tool is aimed at NLP practitioners, psycho-linguists, and (computational) social scientists who want to enrich their datasets with aggregated information, facilitating reproducibility, and providing algorithmic privacy-by-design measures for pseudo-anonymity. We discuss our design choices, inspired by the flow-based programming paradigm, to use black-box components that can easily be chained together and extended. We also analyze the ethical issues related to the use of this tool, and the built-in measures to facilitate pseudo-anonymity.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-demos.29
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Ekaterina Shutova
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
289–297
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-demos.29
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-demos.29
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Federico Bianchi, Vincenzo Cutrona, and Dirk Hovy. 2022. Twitter-Demographer: A Flow-based Tool to Enrich Twitter Data. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 289–297, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Twitter-Demographer: A Flow-based Tool to Enrich Twitter Data (Bianchi et al., EMNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-demos.29.pdf