bloomua/123RFThe only thing worse than drunk texting? Drunk chirping, ok. Because when you’re drunk, the last thing you want is an audience, especially when that audience is a Twitter verse. But if you’ve been drinking and tweeting in the past, you can regain some dignity knowing that you contributed to a major study that now allows scientists to detect how drunk you are when you use social media — or, more simply, whether your last Twitter contribution was made while drunk .
In a truly monumental piece of research, Nabil Hossain of the University of Rochester took Twitter and machine learning and combined them to determine drinking habits in specific geographic locations. Hossain and his team rounded up thousands of geotagged posts that appeared on Twitter between July 2013 and July 2014 across New York State, then parsed them to examine only tweets that contained alcohol-related keywords ( think “barrel of beer,” “drunk” and the like).
This ultimately gave them a database of about 11,000 tweets to work with, which the researchers fed to Amazon’s crowdsourcing service Mechanical Turk. Each of those thousands of tweets was examined by three human “Turks,” who answered three questions about the posts:
- Does the tweet mention any drinking?
- If so, is the tweet about you tweeting yourself drinking alcoholic beverages?
- If so, is it likely that the tweet was sent at a time and place when the tweeter was drinking alcoholic beverages?
The answers derived from these questions gave the team a clue as to whether the tweets were coming from people who had been drinking or were drunk. Then, taking their research further, Hossain and his team looked at where tweeters were when they were drinking (or at least tweeting drunk). By the end of their efforts, they were able to create an algorithm that could theoretically determine whether a user was at home when they drunk-tweeted with up to 80 percent accuracy.
By combining these two determinations, Hossain says his research group can now determine where New Yorkers prefer to drink, thereby identifying their favorite watering holes. “Our results show that tweets can provide strong and precise clues about the activities taking place in cities,” notes Hossain’s team, and monitoring this type of activity could help protect drinkers.
Don’t be embarrassed by your drunk tweets (at least not for this reason). After all, they could save your life.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn