Abstract
Although Twitter played an important role in supporting victims of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disaster, we encountered a number of situations in which the vast flow of unauthorized information was problematics. To assess the credibility and importance of a piece of information, we find that it is important to analyze the statement structure on Twitter and to understand the background of information. In this study, we propose a method for analyzing the statement relation between a tweet and its reply or quoted tweet. More specifically, we assume that a reply or quoted tweet expresses a statement relation (e.g., agreement, rebuttal, question, other) toward the target tweet, and we build a classifier for predicting a statement relation for a given pair of tweets. The experimental results report the performance of the classifier for predicting statement relations. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed method can be applied to analyze statement relations between tweets that have no direct reply/quoting link, and we compare the proposed approach with the previous method based on textual entailment.
