TweetCaT: a tool for building Twitter corpora of smaller languages

Nikola Ljubešić, Darja Fišer, Tomaž Erjavec


Abstract
This paper presents TweetCaT, an open-source Python tool for building Twitter corpora that was designed for smaller languages. Using the Twitter search API and a set of seed terms, the tool identifies users tweeting in the language of interest together with their friends and followers. By running the tool for 235 days we tested it on the task of collecting two monitor corpora, one for Croatian and Serbian and the other for Slovene, thus also creating new and valuable resources for these languages. A post-processing step on the collected corpus is also described, which filters out users that tweet predominantly in a foreign language thus further cleans the collected corpora. Finally, an experiment on discriminating between Croatian and Serbian Twitter users is reported.
Anthology ID:
L14-1642
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2279–2283
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/834_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nikola Ljubešić, Darja Fišer, and Tomaž Erjavec. 2014. TweetCaT: a tool for building Twitter corpora of smaller languages. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 2279–2283, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
TweetCaT: a tool for building Twitter corpora of smaller languages (Ljubešić et al., LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/834_Paper.pdf