Everyone’s Invited: A New Paradigm For Evaluation on Non-transferable Datasets

Social media data mining and analytics has stimulated a wide array of computational research. Traditionally, individual researchers are responsible for acquiring and managing their own datasets. However, the temporal nature of social data, the challenges involved in correctly preparing a dataset, the sheer scale of many datasets, and the proprietary nature of many data sources can make extending and comparing computational methods difficult and often impossible. In light of this, because replicability is a fundamental pillar of the scientific process and because method comparison is essential to characterizing computational advancements, we require an alternative to the traditional model of researcher-owned datasets. In this paper we propose FREESR, a framework that gives researchers the ability to develop and test method performance without requiring direct access to “shared” datasets. As a case study and first community resource, we have implemented the FREESR paradigm around the task of Tweet geolocation. The implementation showcases the clear suitability of this framework for the social media research context. Beyond the implementation, we see the FREESR paradigm as being an important step towards making study reproducibility and method comparison more principled and ubiquitous in the social media research community.