A Study on Detecting Patterns in Twitter Intra-topic User and Message Clustering

Timely detection of hidden patterns is the key for the analysis and estimating of driving determinants for mission critical decision making. This study applies Cheong and Lee’s “context-aware” content analysis framework to extract latent properties from Twitter messages (tweets). In addition, we incorporate an unsupervised Self-organizing Feature Map (SOM) as a machine learning-based clustering tool that has not been investigated in the context of opinion mining and sentimental analysis using microblogging. Our experimental results reveal the detection of interesting patterns for topics of interest which are latent and cannot be easily detected from the observed tweets without the aid of machine learning tools.