Task: Question Answering
Input (English): Twitter provides well-documented API, which allows to request any information about Tweets, users and their profiles, with respect to rate limits. There is special type of API, called Streaming API, that provides a real-time stream of tweets. The key difference with regular API is that connection is kept alive as long as possible, and Tweets are sent in real-time to the client. There are three endpoints of Streaming API of our interest: “sample”, “filter” and “firehose”. The first one provides a sample (random subset) of the full Tweet stream. The second one allows to receive Tweets matching some search criteria: matching to one or more search keywords, produced by subset of users, or coming from certain geo location. The last one provides the full set of Tweets, although it is not available by default. In order to get Twitter “firehose” one can contact Twitter, or buy this stream from third-parties.

In our case the simplest approach would be to use “sample” endpoint, but it provides Tweets in all possible languages from all over the World, while we are concerned only about one language (Russian). In order to use this endpoint we implemented filtering based on language. The filter is simple: if Tweet does not contain a substring of 3 or more cyrillic symbols, it is considered non-Russian. Although this approach keeps Tweets in Mongolian, Ukrainian and other slavic languages (because they use cyrillic alphabet), the total amount of false-positives in this case is negligible. To demonstrate this we conducted simple experiment: on a random sample of 200 tweets only 5 were in a language different from Russian. In order not to rely on Twitter language detection, we chose to proceed with this method of language-based filtering.

However, the amount of Tweets received through “sample” endpoint was not satisfying. This is probably because “sample” endpoint always streams the same content to all its clients, and small portion of it comes in Russian language. In order to force mining of Tweets in Russian language, we chose "filter" endpoint, which requires some search query. We constructed heuristic query, containing some auxiliary words, specific to Russian language: conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions. The full list is as follows:

russian я, у, к, в, по, на, ты, мы, до, на, она, он, и, да. 
 Question: Which Twitter corpus was used to train the word vectors?
Output (English): They collected tweets in Russian language using a heuristic query specific to Russian