sandy4321/twitter-tools

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools

This is a collection of tools for the TREC Microblog Track, which contains the official search API for TREC 2014 (which was also used in TREC 2013). Please join the mailing list for discussion at [email protected].

Participating in TREC 2014

In order to participate in the TREC 2014 Microblog track, you need to register to participate in TREC. See the call for participation. The call will close in late May.

The Microblog track in 2014 will use the "evaluation as a service" (EaaS) model (more below), where teams interact with the official corpus via a common API. Thus, you need to request access to the API via the following steps:

NOTE: If you participated in TREC 2013 and already have access to the API, you do not need to do anything.

1. Fill out the API usage agreement.
2. Email the usage agreement to [email protected].
3. After NIST receives your request, you will receive an access token from NIST.
4. The code for accessing the API can be found in this repository. The endpoint of API itself (i.e., hostname, port) can be found at this location.

Note that the file is password protected with the same username/password combination as the TREC 2014 Active Participants site: you should have received the username/password when you signed up for TREC 2014. Please do not publicize this information.

Getting Stated

The main Maven artifact for the TREC Microblog API is twitter-tools-core. The latest releases of Maven artifacts are available at Maven Central.

You can clone the repo with the following command:

$ git clone git://github.com/lintool/twitter-tools.git

Once you've cloned the repository, change directory into twitter-tools-core and build the package with Maven:

$ cd twitter-tools-core
$ mvn clean package appassembler:assemble

To automatically generate project files for Eclipse:

$ mvn eclipse:clean
$ mvn eclipse:eclipse

You can then use Eclipse's Import "Existing Projects into Workspace" functionality to import the project.

For more information, see the project wiki.

Replicating TREC Baselines

One advantage of the TREC Microblog API is that it is possible to deploy a community baseline whose results are replicable by anyone. The raw results are simply the output of the API unmodified. The baseline results are the raw results that have been post-processed to remove retweets and break score ties by reverse chronological order (earliest first).

To run the raw results for TREC 2011, issue the following command:

sh target/appassembler/bin/RunQueriesThrift \
 -host [host] -port [port] -group [group] -token [token] \
 -queries ../data/topics.microblog2011.txt > run.microblog2011.raw.txt

And to run the baseline results for TREC 2011, issue the following command:

sh target/appassembler/bin/RunQueriesBaselineThrift \
 -host [host] -port [port] -group [group] -token [token] \
 -queries ../data/topics.microblog2011.txt > run.microblog2011.baseline.txt

Note that trec_eval is included in twitter-tools/etc (just needs to be compiled), and the qrels are stored in twitter-tools/data (just needs to be uncompressed), so you can evaluate as follows:

../etc/trec_eval ../data/qrels.microblog2011.txt run.microblog2011.raw.txt

Similar commands will allow you to replicate runs for TREC 2012 and TREC 2013. With trec_eval, you should get exactly the following results:

             TREC 2011         TREC 2012         TREC 2013
             MAP     P30       MAP     P30       MAP    P30
raw        0.3050  0.3483    0.1815  0.2932    0.2044 0.3761
baseline   0.3576  0.4000    0.2091  0.3311    0.2532 0.4450

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Acknowledgements

This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under award IIS-1218043. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the researchers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.