Aggregating Content and Network Information to Curate Twitter User Lists
This addresses the need for balanced and effective list curation for media outlets on Twitter, but it is incremental as it builds on existing recommender system approaches.
The paper tackled the problem of curating Twitter user lists for news stories by proposing criteria based on content analysis, network analysis, and crowdsourcing, and found that aggregating these views produced more accurate user recommendations.
Twitter introduced user lists in late 2009, allowing users to be grouped according to meaningful topics or themes. Lists have since been adopted by media outlets as a means of organising content around news stories. Thus the curation of these lists is important - they should contain the key information gatekeepers and present a balanced perspective on a story. Here we address this list curation process from a recommender systems perspective. We propose a variety of criteria for generating user list recommendations, based on content analysis, network analysis, and the "crowdsourcing" of existing user lists. We demonstrate that these types of criteria are often only successful for datasets with certain characteristics. To resolve this issue, we propose the aggregation of these different "views" of a news story on Twitter to produce more accurate user recommendations to support the curation process.