So you’ve had a few drinks and decide it would be a great idea to drunk text someone? The next morning you wake up and check your phone to see several responses which make you swear to never drink again (or at least until the next night out with your friends). The next worst thing? Drunk Tweeting.
Drunk texting is to a certain person, but drunk tweeting will see your message shared around the entire world for all to see. As a response Nabil Hossain at the University of Rochester, New York, has made a machine learning program that can spot drunk tweets.
After collecting thousands of geotagged twitter posts from New York state, the team created a machine learning program that could answer three questions.
- Does the tweet make any reference to drinking alcoholic beverages?
- If so, is the tweet about the tweeter him/herself drinking alcoholic beverages?
- If so, is it likely that the tweet was sent at the time and place the tweeter was consuming alcoholic beverages?
By answering these three questions the machine learning program could tell if you are talking about the past or present drinking and if so what are the chances you were drunk at the time. By getting the program to learn from 80% of their collected tweets, the machine learning algorithm was able to correctly identify the remaining 20% of tweets as drunk tweets 82-92% of the time.
By then adding “home detection” to the equation, Hossain was able to calculate who preferred to drink at home or out in the city using the geotagging information. Sadly the system won’t be able to spot and stop you drink tweeting next time you have a glass or two but maybe it could in the future.
