WeiboStand: capturing Chinese breaking news using Weibo ‘tweets’
Published in Mathematical and Computer Modelling, 2014
Recommended citation: Fu, C., Samet, H., & Sankaranarayanan, J. (2014, November). WeiboStand: capturing Chinese breaking news using Weibo" tweets". In Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Location-Based Social Networks (pp. 41-48). http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2755492.2755499
Abstract
Weibo is the premier microblog service in China, which is nicknamed as the “Chinese Twitter”. Weibo messages consist of text messages, short links, images, audio and video. Its text is restricted to 140 Chinese characters. Since Twitter is blocked in the mainland of China, Weibo is the dominant microblog service in China. The dominance of Weibo in China makes it an obvious choice for capturing late breaking news. This paper describes the implementation of a system for capturing messages corresponding to late breaking news as well as a visualization tool that can display Weibo news messages on a map interface. There are several technical challenges to building this system. First, methods to automatically recognize and disambiguate geographical locations in messages written in Chinese. Second, due to the lack of a free accessible real-time streaming API as that similar to the Twitter Public Streaming API, a new strategy to collect the most recent news-related Weibo messages is devised. The system also uses news from Chinese news RSS feeds as complementary sources.