Social media: source of information or bunch of noise

Abstract

Social media has witnessed an explosive growth in the past few years. Wikipedia has over 3.5 million pages with descriptions of entities. Flickr members have uploaded over 5 billion photos,You Tube has 35 hours of videos uploaded to the site each minute, and Twitter users generate 65 million tweets a day. While some forms of social media like Wikipedia clearly have valuable information embedded in them, the jury is still out on other forms like tweets, comments, and social network (e.g., Facebook) updates. Some of the key questions that the panel will debate include: Is there useful information in social media like tweets? How to extract structured records from unstructured user-generated content like reviews? How to sift through the vast amounts of social media and filter out the spam/offensive content? How to rank social media like blogs and comments based on relevance or importance? How can social media be leveraged to achieve tasks like entity disambiguation, question answering, improved search, etc.? What are the novel Web applications where social media can be leveraged?