• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.163-176
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• 2014

Social media is becoming the platform for users to communicate their activities, status, emotions, and experiences to other people. In recent years, microblogs, such as Twitter, have gained in popularity because of its ease of use, speed, and reach. Compared to a conventional web blog, a microblog lowers users' efforts and investment for content generation by recommending shorter posts. There has been a lot research into capturing the social phenomena and analyzing the chatter of microblogs. However, measuring television ratings has been given little attention so far. Currently, the most common method to measure TV ratings uses an electronic metering device installed in a small number of sampled households. Microblogs allow users to post short messages, share daily updates, and conveniently keep in touch. In a similar way, microblog users are interacting with each other while watching television or movies, or visiting a new place. In order to measure TV ratings, some features are significant during certain hours of the day, or days of the week, whereas these same features are meaningless during other time periods. Thus, the importance of features can change during the day, and a model capturing the time sensitive relevance is required to estimate TV ratings. Therefore, modeling time-related characteristics of features should be a key when measuring the TV ratings through microblogs. We show that capturing time-dependency of features in measuring TV ratings is vitally necessary for improving their accuracy. To explore the relationship between the content of microblogs and TV ratings, we collected Twitter data using the Get Search component of the Twitter REST API from January 2013 to October 2013. There are about 300 thousand posts in our data set for the experiment. After excluding data such as adverting or promoted tweets, we selected 149 thousand tweets for analysis. The number of tweets reaches its maximum level on the broadcasting day and increases rapidly around the broadcasting time. This result is stems from the characteristics of the public channel, which broadcasts the program at the predetermined time. From our analysis, we find that count-based features such as the number of tweets or retweets have a low correlation with TV ratings. This result implies that a simple tweet rate does not reflect the satisfaction or response to the TV programs. Content-based features extracted from the content of tweets have a relatively high correlation with TV ratings. Further, some emoticons or newly coined words that are not tagged in the morpheme extraction process have a strong relationship with TV ratings. We find that there is a time-dependency in the correlation of features between the before and after broadcasting time. Since the TV program is broadcast at the predetermined time regularly, users post tweets expressing their expectation for the program or disappointment over not being able to watch the program. The highly correlated features before the broadcast are different from the features after broadcasting. This result explains that the relevance of words with TV programs can change according to the time of the tweets. Among the 336 words that fulfill the minimum requirements for candidate features, 145 words have the highest correlation before the broadcasting time, whereas 68 words reach the highest correlation after broadcasting. Interestingly, some words that express the impossibility of watching the program show a high relevance, despite containing a negative meaning. Understanding the time-dependency of features can be helpful in improving the accuracy of TV ratings measurement. This research contributes a basis to estimate the response to or satisfaction with the broadcasted programs using the time dependency of words in Twitter chatter. More research is needed to refine the methodology for predicting or measuring TV ratings.