Prediction of Likes and Retweets Using Text Information Retrieval

Twitter is one of the major social media platforms today to study human behaviours by analysing their interactions. To ensure popularity of the tweet, the focus should be on the content of the tweet that results in numerous followings of that message with sufficient number of likes and retweets. The high quality of tweets, increases the online reputation of the users who post it. If a user can get the prediction of likes and retweets on his text before posting it on the internet, it would improve the popularity of the tweet from information sharing perspective. In this paper we employed different machine learning classifiers like SVM, Nave Bayes, Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and Neural Network, on top of two different text processing approaches used in NLP (natural language processing), namely bag-of-words (TFIDF) and word embeddings (Doc2Vec), to check how many likes and retweets can a tweet generate. The results obtained indicate that all the models performed 10-15% better with the bagof-word technique. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.