T wee NLP : A T witter Exploration Portal for Natural Language Processing (2021)

Abstract: We present TweeNLP, a one-stop portal that organizes Twitter’s natural language processing (NLP) data and builds a visualization and exploration platform. It curates 19,395 tweets (as of April 2021) from various NLP conferences and general NLP discussions. It supports multiple features such as TweetExplorer to explore tweets by topics, visualize insights from Twitter activity throughout the organization cycle of conferences, discover popular research papers and researchers. It also builds a timeline of conference and workshop submission deadlines. We envision TweeNLP to function as a collective memory unit for the NLP community by integrating the tweets pertaining to research papers with the NLPExplorer scientific literature search engine. The current system is hosted at http://nlpexplorer.org/twitter/CFP .

## introduction online communication channels have become popular in the internet era, and several online communities of like-minded people have evolved around these channels. for example, communities such as stack overflow and askubuntu are questionanswering forums; twitter and reddit are contentsharing forums. these forums over the years have provided a platform for novice users to learn from the experts, facilitated discussions among the community members, and have over the years accumulated a rich database of questions, answers, and discussions. according to the theory of diffusion of innovation proposed by @xcite , the communication channel is one of the four main elements influencing the spread of a new idea. notably, the communication channel serves as a collective longterm memory or a knowledge archive of the community, which any member can access to study the community's stance on diverse topics at any point in time. although several mailing lists, slack channels, and subreddits exist for communication, most natural language processing (henceforth nlp) community discussions are primarily carried out on twitter due to its open accessibility and wider reach. announcements of calls for papers and submission deadlines, recently accepted papers, interesting talks and seminars, lecture videos, and tutorials on various topics are often posted on twitter. these are a great medium to stay updated on the recent developments in the nlp field. it is also a medium for researchers to engage in informal research discussions which might be unreported in official publications. we present a sample of diverse nlp tweets in figure 1 to emphasise the utility of the platform. however, unlike subreddits or communities like stack overflow and askubuntu, twitter is not an exclusive channel for nlp discussions. exclusive channels provide users a one-stop destination for their interests and allow extremely topic-specific exploration. while twitter allows search by hashtags to narrow down to specific topics, the usage of hashtags is highly irregular. furthermore, twitter is more suited to live discussions and less suitable for maintaining a snapshot of the discussions taking place in the online community. relevant twitter discussions about specific research papers are often forgotten in the long run because there is no infrastructure to link these discussions with the papers on the proceedings archives or research paper search engines. in an attempt to address these issues, we extend the functionality of nlp-explorer @xcite platform by integrating tweenlp with it. nlpexplorer is a portal for searching, and visualizing nlp research volume based on the acl anthology (acl anthology). in our current work, we build an automatic pipeline for curating nlp tweets and build a one-stop portal -tweenlp, for the search and browsing of nlp discussion on twitter. the system has curated 19,395 nlp tweets as of april 2021. tweenlp organizes nlp tweets into topics: (i) new paper announcements, (ii) call for paper announcements, (iii) reading materials & tutorials, (iv) career opportunities, (v) talks & seminars, and (vi) others. topic-wise tweets are presented via dashboards for easy exploration. tweenlp supports dashboards to browse through popular nlp tweets in the previous week and the month. we construct a cfp timeline from 'call for papers' announcements on twitter and arrange it according to the upcoming submission deadlines of various workshops and conferences. we link the research paper tweets to the research paper's metadata, accessible via the nlpexplorer paper discovery feature. we also build live conference visualization dashboards, which curate tweets about the conference schedule, ongoing talks, poster sessions, and interesting papers at the conference, and present statistics such as popular hashtags, users, tweet languages, etc. we integrate tweenlp with nlpexplorer (section 2) to build a joint-portal that aims to bridge the gap between published research and its informal communication on the social media platform twitter. our automatic data curation pipeline and the architecture of the system is described in section 3 and section 4 respectively. we describe the features of tweenlp in detail in section 5. in section 6, we discuss previous works in organizing the nlp literature and visualization of research papers. ## dataset we curate the dataset from two primary sources: ## architecture we present the pipeline of our system in figure 2 . the data curator module curates tweets daily. the curated tweets are processed before we perform further steps. the following modules process tweets: (i) tweet classifier, (ii) conference page builder, (iii) cfp timeline builder, and (iv) paper tweet linker. we describe the tweet processing modules in detail below: the detailed description of each topic is pre-3 https://github.com/acl-org/ acl-anthology sented in section 5.1. we experiment by finetuning a bert-base @xcite classifier and twitter-roberta-base @xcite to predict the tweet topics. the bertbase model foot_2 obtains the best test accuracy of 75% on a small manually annotated dataset foot_3 .