Buzz Tweet Classification Based on Text and Image Features of Tweets Using Multi-Task Learning

Abstract

This study investigates social media trends and proposes a buzz tweet classification method to explore the factors causing the buzz phenomenon on Twitter. It is difficult to identify the causes of the buzz phenomenon based solely on texts posted on Twitter. It is expected that by limiting the tweets to those with attached images and using the characteristics of the images and the relationships between the text and images, a more detailed analysis than that of with text-only tweets can be conducted. Therefore, an analysis method was devised based on a multi-task neural network that uses both the features extracted from the image and text as input and the buzz class (buzz/non-buzz) and the number of “likes (favorites)” and “retweets (RTs)” as output. The predictions made using a single feature of the text and image were compared with the predictions using a combination of multiple features. The differences between buzz and non-buzz features were analyzed based on the cosine similarity between the text and the image. The buzz class was correctly identified with a correctness rate of approximately 80% for all combinations of image and text features, with the combination of BERT and VGG16 providing the highest correctness rate.

Keywords

• multi-task learning
• buzz classification
• social media
• trend analysis