Toward a Comparable Corpus of Latvian, Russian and English Tweets

Abstract

Twitter has become a rich source for linguistic data. Here, a possibility of building a trilingual Latvian-Russian-English corpus of tweets from Riga, Latvia is investigated. Such a corpus, once constructed, might be of great use for multiple purposes including training machine translation models, examining cross-lingual phenomena and studying the population of Riga. This pilot study shows that it is feasible to build such a resource by collecting and analysing a pilot corpus, which is made publicly available and can be used to construct a large comparable corpus.

What Can We Learn from Almost a Decade of Food Tweets

“…Even though the usage and popularity of Twitter have stopped rapidly growing and even dropped in recent years 2 , it still has a considerable amount of loyal users who keep on sharing everything from worldwide events to random personal details with their followers. We decided to focus on one of the random personal details that people share, specifically, anything to do with food consumption and related topics.…”

“…Several corpora of Latvian tweets exist in prior work, but none of them are domainspecific and have been collected over an extensive period of time. Milajevs [1] collected and analysed 1.4 million tweets geo-located in Riga, Latvia from April 2017 to July 2018 and 60 thousand tweets [2] from November 2016 to March 2017. Pinnis [3] collected and analysed 3.8 million tweets of Latvian politicians, companies, media, and users who interacted from August 2016 to July 2018 There are also several data sets of general sentiment-annotated tweets [4], [5], [3] 3 amounting to 14,781 tweets in total.…”