Consensus Clustering of Tweet Networks via Semantic and Sentiment Similarity Estimation

Although Twitter has become an important source of information, the number of accessible tweets is too large for users to easily find their desired information. To overcome this difficulty, a method for tweet clustering is proposed in this paper. Inspired by the reports that network representation is useful for multimedia content analysis including clustering, a network-based approach is employed. Specifically, a consensus clustering method for tweet networks that represent relationships among the tweets’ semantics and sentiment are newly derived. The proposed method integrates multiple clustering results obtained by applying successful clustering methods to the tweet networks. By integrating complementary clustering results obtained based on semantic and sentiment features, the accurate clustering of tweets becomes feasible. The contribution of this work can be found in the utilization of the features, which differs from existing network-based consensus clustering methods that target only the network structure. Experimental results for a real-world Twitter dataset, which includes 65 553 tweets of 25 datasets, verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.