Preliminary research on thesaurus-based query expansion for Twitter data extraction

With the increasing popularity of microblogging and social media platforms like Twitter, researchers are trying to make use of the massive amount of user-created data to explore new applications/tools. Success of research in data science is highly dependent on the amount and type of data collected. For this effort, a thesaurus-based query expansion technique from information retrieval will be used to extract additional Twitter data. Though there has been research in this general area, our effort concentrates on applying a thesaurus-based query expansion for Twitter retrieval. Experiments are performed to collect Twitter data using the proposed approach for query terms related to disaster situations like hurricanes and shootings. We observed an increase of 32% in tweets received for the Hurricane Harvey event, and a 131% increase in the volume of tweets for a query related to the Vegas shooting incidence using the thesaurus-based query expansion approach.