Making sense of social media streams through semantics: A survey

Using semantic technologies for mining and intelligent information access to social media is a challenging, emerging research area. Traditional search methods are no longer able to address the more complex information seeking behaviour in media streams, which has evolved towards sense making, learning, investigation, and social search. Unlike carefully authored news text and longer web context, social media streams pose a number of new challenges, due to their large-scale, short, noisy, context-dependent, and dynamic nature. This paper defines five key research questions in this new application area, examined through a survey of state-of-the-art approaches for mining semantics from social media streams; user, network, and behaviour modelling; and intelligent, semantic-based information access. The survey includes key methods not just from the Semantic Web research field, but also from the related areas of natural language processing and user modelling. In conclusion, key outstanding challenges are discussed and new directions for research are proposed.