Groundhog day

Abstract

With more than 340~million messages that are posted on Twitter every day, the amount of duplicate content as well as the demand for appropriate duplicate detection mechanisms is increasing tremendously. Yet there exists little research that aims at detecting near-duplicate content on microblogging platforms. We investigate the problem of near-duplicate detection on Twitter and introduce a framework that analyzes the tweets by comparing (i) syntactical characteristics, (ii) semantic similarity, and (iii) contextual information. Our framework provides different duplicate detection strategies that, among others, make use of external Web resources which are referenced from microposts. Machine learning is exploited in order to learn patterns that help identifying duplicate content. We put our duplicate detection framework into practice by integrating it into Twinder, a search engine for Twitter streams. An in-depth analysis shows that it allows Twinder to diversify search results and improve the quality of Twitter search. We conduct extensive experiments in which we (1) evaluate the quality of different strategies for detecting duplicates, (2) analyze the impact of various features on duplicate detection, (3) investigate the quality of strategies that classify to what exact level two microposts can be considered as duplicates and (4) optimize the process of identifying duplicate content on Twitter. Our results prove that semantic features which are extracted by our framework can boost the performance of detecting duplicates.