Language technology for agile social media science

We present an extension of the DUALIST tool that enables social scientists to engage directly with large Twitter datasets. Our approach supports collaborative construction of classifiers and associated gold standard data sets. The tool can be used to build classifier cascades that decomposes tweet streams, and provide analysis of targeted conversations. A central concern is to provide an environment in which social science researchers can rapidly develop an informed sense of what the datasets look like. The intent is that they develop, not only an informed view as to how the data could be fruitfully analysed, but also how feasible it is to analyse it in that way.