@inproceedings{L16-1473,
 abstract = {We set out to investigate whether TV ratings and mentions of TV programmes on the Twitter social media platform are correlated. If such a correlation exists, Twitter may be used as an alternative source for estimating viewer popularity. Moreover, the Twitter-based rating estimates may be generated during the programme, or even before. We count the occurrences of programme-specific hashtags in an archive of Dutch tweets of eleven popular TV shows broadcast in the Netherlands in one season, and perform correlation tests. Overall we find a strong correlation of 0.82; the correlation remains strong, 0.79, if tweets are counted a half hour before broadcast time. However, the two most popular TV shows account for most of the positive effect; if we leave out the single and second most popular TV shows, the correlation drops to being moderate to weak. Also, within a TV show, correlations between ratings and tweet counts are mostly weak, while correlations between TV ratings of the previous and next shows are strong. In absence of information on previous shows, Twitter-based counts may be a viable alternative to classic estimation methods for TV ratings. Estimates are more reliable with more popular TV shows.
},
 address = {Portorož, Slovenia},
 author = {Bridget Sommerdijk and Eric Sanders and Antal van den Bosch},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)},
 month = {May},
 pages = {2965--2970},
 publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
 title = {Can Tweets Predict TV Ratings?},
 url = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/L16-1473},
 year = {2016}
}