Blog: Most Influential Tweeters of All

Most Influential Tweeters of All
Northwestern University News Center (IL) (09/09/10) Erin White

Northwestern University researchers have designed a Web site that tracks the top trending topics on Twitter in real time. The Web site--pulseofthetweeters.com--uses an algorithm to rank the most influential people tweeting on trending topics. The researchers say the algorithm combines dynamic data mining, sentiment analysis, and network analysis in real time. In addition to identifying the most influential tweeters, the algorithm can tell users whether the tweets are positive, negative, or neutral. "Discovering patterns, opinions, and sentiments from massive number of tweets is challenging in itself, but discovering influencers and leaders for specific topics is a major technological advance in data mining," says Northwestern professor Alok Choudhary. "The good thing about our system is it's completely automatic, and it needs minimal human supervision," says Northwestern's Ramanathan Narayanan.

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