Analyzing the language of food on social media

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

60 Scopus citations

Abstract

We investigate the predictive power behind the language of food on social media. We collect a corpus of over three million food-related posts from Twitter and demonstrate that many latent population characteristics can be directly predicted from this data: overweight rate, diabetes rate, political leaning, and home geographical location of authors. For all tasks, our language-based models significantly outperform the majority-class baselines. Performance is further improved with more complex natural language processing, such as topic modeling. We analyze which textual features have greatest predictive power for these datasets, providing insight into the connections between the language of food, geographic locale, and community characteristics. Lastly, we design and implement an online system for real-time query and visualization of the dataset. Visualization tools, such as geo-referenced heatmaps and temporal histograms, allow us to discover more complex, global patterns mirrored in the language of food.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2014 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, IEEE Big Data 2014
EditorsWo Chang, Jun Huan, Nick Cercone, Saumyadipta Pyne, Vasant Honavar, Jimmy Lin, Xiaohua Tony Hu, Charu Aggarwal, Bamshad Mobasher, Jian Pei, Raghunath Nambiar
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages778-783
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781479956654
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 7 2015
Event2nd IEEE International Conference on Big Data, IEEE Big Data 2014 - Washington, United States
Duration: Oct 27 2014Oct 30 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2014 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, IEEE Big Data 2014

Other

Other2nd IEEE International Conference on Big Data, IEEE Big Data 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityWashington
Period10/27/1410/30/14

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Information Systems

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