An empirical study on learning to rank of tweets

Twitter, as one of the most popular micro-blogging services, provides large quantities of fresh information including real-time news, comments, conversation, pointless babble and advertisements. Twitter presents tweets in chronological order. Recently, Twitter introduced a new ranking strategy that considers popularity of tweets in terms of number of re tweets. This ranking method, however, has not taken into account content relevance or the twitter account. Therefore a large amount of pointless tweets inevitably flood the relevant tweets. This paper proposes a new ranking strategy which uses not only the content relevance of a tweet, but also the account authority and tweet-specific features such as whether a URL link is included in the tweet. We employ learning to rank algorithms to determine the best set of features with a series of experiments. It is demonstrated that whether a tweet contains URL or not, length of tweet and account authority are the best conjunction.1.