Searching and Filtering Tweets: CSIRO at the TREC 2012 Microblog Track

We report on the participation of the CSIRO team in the TREC 2012 Microblog Track. We participated with four automatic runs for the adhoc search task and four automatic runs for the filtering task. In the adhoc search task, we experiment with different pre-processing and query expansion techniques. Our most important finding is highlighting the value of systematic pre-processing of tweets and its impact on improving the effectiveness of search. In the filtering task, we apply different feature extraction and classification techniques. We demonstrate the potential of using SVM classifiers for filtering tweets for a given topic.