K2: A Novel Data Analysis Framework to Understand US Emotions in Space and Time

Abstract

Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms used by millions of users daily to post their opinions and emotions. Consequently, Twitter tweets have become a valuable knowledge source for emotion analysis. In this paper, we present a new framework, K2, for tweet emotion mapping and emotion change analysis. It introduces a novel, generic spatio-temporal data analysis and storytelling framework that can be used to understand the emotional evolution of a specific section of population. The input for our framework is the location and time of where and when the tweets were posted and an emotion assessment score in the range [Formula: see text], with [Formula: see text] representing a very high positive emotion and [Formula: see text] representing a very high negative emotion. Our framework first segments the input dataset into a number of batches with each batch representing a specific time interval. This time interval can be a week, a month or a day. By generalizing existing kernel density estimation techniques in the next step, we transform each batch into a continuous function that takes positive and negative values. We have used contouring algorithms to find the contiguous regions with highly positive and highly negative emotions belonging to each member of the batch. Finally, we apply a generic, change analysis framework that monitors how positive and negative emotion regions evolve over time. In particular, using this framework, unary and binary change predicate are defined and matched against the identified spatial clusters, and change relationships will then be recorded, for those spatial clusters for which a match occurs. We also propose animation techniques to facilitate spatio-temporal data storytelling based on the obtained spatio-temporal data analysis results. We demo our approach using tweets collected in the state of New York in the month of June 2014.