Twitter has quickly become one of the most popular social media sites. It has 313 million monthly active users, and 500 million tweets are published daily. With the massive number of tweets, Twitter users share information about a location along with the temporal awareness. In this work, I focus on tweets where author of the tweets exclusively mentions a location in the tweet. Natural language processing systems can leverage wide range of information from the tweets to build applications like recommender systems that predict the location of the author. This kind of system can be used to increase the visibility of the targeted audience and can also provide recommendations interesting places to visit, hotels to stay, restaurants to eat, targeted on-line advertising, and co-traveler matching based on the temporal information extracted from a tweet. In this work I determine if the author of the tweet is present in the mentioned location of the tweet. I also determine if the author is present in the location before tweeting, while tweeting, or after tweeting. I introduce 5 temporal tags (before the tweet but > 24 hours; before the tweet but < 24 hours; during the tweet is posted; after the tweet is posted but < 24 hours; and after the tweet is posted but > 24 hours). The major contributions of this paper are: (1) creation of a corpus of 1062 tweets containing 1200 location named entities, containing annotations whether author of a tweet is or is not located in the location he tweets about with respect to 5 temporal tags; (2) detailed corpus analysis including real annotation examples and label distributions per temporal tag; (3) detailed inter-annotator agreements, including Cohen's kappa, Krippendorff's alpha and confusion matrices per temporal tag; (4) label distributions and analysis; and (5) supervised learning experiments, along with the results.

Durant les situations de crise, telles que les catastrophes, le besoin de recherche d’informations (RI) pertinentes partagées dans les microblogs en temps réel est inévitable. Cependant, le grand volume et la variété des flux d’informations partagées en temps réel dans de telles situations compliquent cette tâche. Contrairement aux approches existantes de RI basées sur l’analyse du contenu, nous proposons de nous attaquer à ce problème en nous basant sur les approches centrées utilisateurs tout en levant un certain nombre de verrous méthodologiques et technologiques inhérents : 1) à la collection des données partagées par les utilisateurs à évaluer, 2) à la modélisation de leurs comportements, 3) à l’analyse des comportements, et 4) à la prédiction et le suivi des utilisateurs primordiaux en temps réel. Dans ce contexte, nous détaillons les approches proposées dans cette thèse afin de prédire les utilisateurs primordiaux qui sont susceptibles de partager les informations pertinentes et exclusives ciblées et de permettre aux intervenants d’urgence d’accéder aux informations requises quel que soit le format (i.e. texte, image, vidéo, lien hypertexte) et en temps réel. Ces approches sont centrées sur trois principaux aspects. Nous avons tout d’abord étudié l’efficacité de différentes catégories de mesures issues de la littérature et proposées dans cette thèse pour représenter le comportement des utilisateurs. En nous basant sur les mesures pertinentes résultant de cette étude, nous concevons des nouvelles caractéristiques permettant de mettre en évidence la qualité des informations partagées par les utilisateurs selon leurs comportements. Le deuxième aspect consiste à proposer une approche de modélisation du comportement de chaque utilisateur en nous basant sur les critères suivants : 1) la modélisation des utilisateurs selon l’évolution de l’évènement, 2) la modélisation de l’évolution des activités des utilisateurs au fil du temps à travers une représentation sensible au temps, 3) la sélection des caractéristiques les plus discriminantes pour chaque phase de l’évènement. En se basant sur cette approche de modélisation, nous entraînons différents modèles de prédiction qui apprennent à différencier les comportements des utilisateurs primordiaux de ceux qui ne le sont pas durant les situations de crise. Les algorithmes SVM et MOG-HMMs ont été utilisés durant la phase d’apprentissage. La pertinence et l’efficacité des modèles de prédiction appris ont été validées à l’aide des données collectées par notre système multi-agents MASIR durant deux inondations qui ont eu lieu en France et des vérités terrain appropriées à ces collections. / During crisis events such as disasters, the need of real-time information retrieval (IR) from microblogs remains inevitable. However, the huge amount and the variety of the shared information in real time during such events over-complicate this task. Unlike existing IR approaches based on content analysis, we propose to tackle this problem by using user-centricIR approaches with solving the wide spectrum of methodological and technological barriers inherent to : 1) the collection of the evaluated users data, 2) the modeling of user behavior, 3) the analysis of user behavior, and 4) the prediction and tracking of prominent users in real time. In this context, we detail the different proposed approaches in this dissertation leading to the prediction of prominent users who are susceptible to share the targeted relevant and exclusive information on one hand and enabling emergency responders to have a real-time access to the required information in all formats (i.e. text, image, video, links) on the other hand. These approaches focus on three key aspects of prominent users identification. Firstly, we have studied the efficiency of state-of-the-art and new proposed raw features for characterizing user behavior during crisis events. Based on the selected features, we have designed several engineered features qualifying user activities by considering both their on-topic and off-topic shared information. Secondly, we have proposed a phase-aware user modeling approach taking into account the user behavior change according to the event evolution over time. This user modeling approach comprises the following new novel aspects (1) Modeling microblog users behavior evolution by considering the different event phases (2) Characterizing users activity over time through a temporal sequence representation (3) Time-series-based selection of the most discriminative features characterizing users at each event phase. Thirdly, based on this proposed user modeling approach, we train various prediction models to learn to differentiate between prominent and non-prominent users behavior during crisis event. The learning task has been performed using SVM and MoG-HMMs supervised machine learning algorithms. The efficiency and efficacy of these prediction models have been validated thanks to the data collections extracted by our multi-agents system MASIR during two flooding events who have occured in France and the different ground-truths related to these collections.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the events that occurred throughout the Egyptian Revolution from January 2010 to February 2010 through pragmatic humanism. Tweets will be looked at from the book Tweets from Tahrir to show how the process unfolded. Building on the previous research, the tweets will be looked at through the lens of pragmatic humanism. The study will show how individuals can better the world they live in by experimenting with different methods and adapting to any failures they may encounter. The study will also show how the reach of the individual has become faster and further than previously possible. The elements of pragmatic humanism will be broken down into five main tenets. The study will take a thematic approach in analyzing the tweets through the perspective of the particular tenet. The study will also show the power of individual desires when they are able to combine with the social context of the time. The advent of Twitter has allowed individuals to test and experiment with hypotheses much quicker than before and allows them to make monumental changes to their reality in a much shorter period of time. / Graduation date: 2013

The aim of this research is to shed more light on an aspect identified as a gap in knowledge in the literature; the use of a social networking service as knowledge sharing platform. More specifically, this research sets out to establish if the social networking service Twitter could be used as knowledge-sharing platform in small South African businesses in the Western Cape. A mixed method research design is used. This includes gathering data through questionnaires as well as conducting semi-structured interviews for case study participants. The sample comprises 122 questionnaire participants together with 14 semi-structured interview participants across three small businesses located in the Western Cape Province. Although it is apparent from the study conducted that small businesses are not yet willing to forego traditional platforms such as Email to use Twitter exclusively as a knowledge sharing tool, the researcher proposes a case for using Twitter, which he believes, could take the most advantage of the functions Twitter brings to a small business operation. / School of Computing / M. Sc. (Computing)