In case the rambling string of misspelled words and incoherent thoughts weren’t dead giveaways, scientists have developed a method of machine learning to sniff out drunk tweets. Researchers from the University of Rochester collected 11,000 geotagged tweets over a year from two areas: New York and Monroe County, filtering the 140-character notes containing “drunk,” “beer,” “party” and other libation-related words. From there the school employed Amazon Mechanical Turks to decide whether the person sending the tweets was simply talking about booze or were actually drinking it while tweeting.
What’s more, the team was able to develop a method for ascertaining if someone was drinking at home or from another location, with 80 percent accuracy. By matching alcohol-sales locations with the geotagged tweets the researchers discovered via algorithm that while more people in New York tweet about booze than in Monroe County, a higher number of residents of the former are drinking within 100 meters of their homes, if not in their homes outright.
via Engadget
Image: darthmauldds/Flickr
