Vincenzo Cutrona


2022

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Twitter-Demographer: A Flow-based Tool to Enrich Twitter Data
Federico Bianchi | Vincenzo Cutrona | Dirk Hovy
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

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.