Note: [1] This paper is an extended version of our conference paper “Deep Text Mining of Instagram Data Without Strong Supervision” published in 2018 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI).
Abstract: With the advent of social media, our online feeds increasingly consist of short, informal, and unstructured text. Instagram is one of the largest social media platforms, containing both text and images. However, most of the prior research on text processing in social media is focused on analyzing Twitter data, and little attention has been paid to text mining of Instagram data. Moreover, many text mining methods rely on training data annotated manually by humans, which in practice is both difficult and expensive to obtain. In this paper, we present methods for weakly supervised text classification of Instagram text. We analyze a corpora of Instagram posts from the fashion domain and train a deep clothing classifier with weak supervision to classify Instagram posts based on the associated text. With our experiments, we demonstrate that in absence of annotated training data, using weak supervision to train models is a viable approach. With weak supervision we were able to label a large dataset in hours, something that would have taken months to do with human annotators. Using the dataset labeled with weak supervision in combination with generative modeling, an F1 score of 0.61 is achieved on the task of classifying the image contents of Instagram posts based solely on the associated text, which is on level with human performance.
Keywords: Instagram, weak supervision, word embeddings, deep learning
