On the Wisdom of Experts vs. Crowds: Discovering Trustworthy Topical News in Microblogs

Extracting news on specific topics from the Twitter microblogging site poses formidable challenges, which include handling millions of tweets posted daily, judging topicality and importance of tweets, and ensuring trustworthiness of results in the face of spam. To date, all scalable approaches have relied on crowd wisdom, i.e., keyword-matching on the global tweet stream to gather relevant tweets, and crowd- endorsements to judge the importance of tweets. We propose a fundamentally different methodology -- for a given topic, we identify trustworthy experts on the topic, and extract news-stories that are most popular among the experts. Comparing the crowd-based and expert-based methodologies, we demonstrate that the news-stories obtained by our methodology (i) have higher relevance for a wide variety of topics, (ii) achieve very high coverage of important news-stories posted globally in Twitter, and (iii) are far more trustworthy. Using our methodology, we implemented and publicly deployed a topical news system for Twitter, which can extract news-stories on thousands of topics.