Abstract
Social media, a buzz term in the modern world, refers to various online platforms like social networks, forums, blogs and blog comments, microblogs, wikis, media sharing platforms, social bookmarks through which communication between individuals, communities, or groups takes place. People over social media do not only share their ideas and opinions, but it has become an important source through which businesses promote their products. Analyzing huge data generated over social media is useful in various tasks like analyzing customer trends, forecast sales, understanding opinions of people on different hot topics, views of customers about services/products, and many more. Different natural language processing (NLP) techniques are used for crawling and processing social media data to get useful insights out of this. In this chapter, the focus is on various NLP techniques used to process the social media data. Challenges faced by NLP techniques to process social media data are also put forward in this chapter.
TopIntroduction
The use of social media has grown exponentially in the last few years and it has changed the scenario of how communication takes between individuals, groups, and communities (Hallock et al., 2019; Shahbaznezhad et al., 2021; Khanday et al., 2021). Social media means the use of electronic and internet tools with the aim of sharing and discussing ideas and opinions with other people in a productive way (Durgam, 2018). Information shared over various social media platforms can be in textual form or in the form of audio, pictures, videos, etc. Various social media platforms that are commonly used in the present era can be broadly classified into four types, viz. content-sharing sites, blogs, forums, and microblogs (Farzindar & Inkpen, 2020). Content-sharing sites provide users with the facility to share information in different forms like text, photos, audio, and videos. Commonly used online content-sharing sites with a large user base are Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, TikTok, WeChat, YouTube, and Foursquare (Kinsella et al., 2009; Zuo et al., 2021). Web user forums are used by users to post specialized information, queries, or solutions to queries. Some of the forums include Apple Support, Imgur, Final Thoughts, GamesSpot, Quora, phpBB, Stack Overflow, and CNET forums (Hoogeveen et al., 2018). A blog is a type of online platform that allows a user to self-description and interact with others (Miura & Yamashita, 2007; Hain & Back, 2008). Blogs allow individuals to put their ideas and opinions online or make comments on the ideas shared by others (Mansouri & Piki, 2016). On blogs posts appear in chronological order i.e., recent posts about a topic appear at the top. Examples of popular blogs include A Cup of Jo1, Lifehacker2, Hot Air3, Gizmodo4, Mashable5 and many others. Microblogs (like Sina Weibo, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Plurk, and Reddit) on the other hand are used to share information and opinions with limited length (Zhang et al., 2014; Garg & Pahuja, 2021; Khanday et al., 2023).
With the increase in the population of the world, the number of social media users is also growing at a rapid pace. This is due to the wide coverage of social media platforms and their user-friendliness. Social media has become an integral part of life and a wide range of information is available on it in different forms (Pekkala & van Zoonen, 2022; Borah et al., 2022). During its initial phase young population was mainly active on social media but with time the trend changed and now people belonging to all age groups make use of different social media platforms. It has transformed the way people communicate and express their ideas and opinions. People use social media platforms for different purposes like socializing, business, politics, entertainment, dating, day-to-day communication, and education. According to Statista6, the largest portal for statistics, 63% (5 billion) of the total world population make use of the internet as of April 2022. Out of this 93% (4.65 billion) were using social media platforms. The ten most popular used social media platforms that have a wide user base are given in Table 1.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Automatic Summarization: The process of extracting the important information from a document or set of documents and presenting it in a concise form so that the viewer gets the idea of what about the document actually is.
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Processing is a discipline of Artificial Intelligence that deals with how computers can be made capable of automatically manipulating, understanding, and generating natural languages like text, and speech.
Machine Translation: Machine Translation is an application of NLP that performs the translation of text encoded in one language to some other language.
Opinion Mining: Opinion mining is an approach in NLP that tries to infer information about the emotions embedded in the text.
Social media: Social media is an online platform that allows users to find friends, and communicate their ideas and expressions to them and the rest of the world in a way that suits them without the need to follow the linguistic rules of the language they use to communicate.