Re-ranking Real-time Web Tweets to Find Reliable and Influential Twitterers

Abstract

Twitter is a powerful social media tool to share information on different topics around the world. Following different users/accounts is the most effective way to get information propagated in Twitter. Due to Twitter's limited searching and lack of navigation support, searching Twitter is not easy and requires effort to find reliable information. This thesis proposed a new methodology to rank tweets based on their authority with the goal of aiding users identifying influential Twitterers. This methodology, HIRKM rank, is influenced by PageRank, Alexa Rank, original tweet or a retweet and the use of hash tags to determine the authorisation of each tweet. This method is applied to rank TREC 2011 microblogging dataset which contains over 16 million tweets based on 50 predefined topics. The results are a list of tweets presented in a descending order based on their authorities which are relevant to the users search queries and will be evaluated using TREC’s official golden standard for the microblogging dataset