Simple Dynamic Emission Strategies for Microblog Filtering

Push notifications from social media provide a method to keep up-to-date on topics of personal interest. To be effective, notifications must achieve a balance between pushing too much and pushing too little. Push too little and the user misses important updates; push too much and the user is overwhelmed by unwanted information. Using data from the TREC 2015 Microblog track, we explore simple dynamic emission strategies for microblog push notifications. The key to effective notifications lies in establishing and maintaining appropriate thresholds for pushing updates. We explore and evaluate multiple threshold setting strategies, including purely static thresholds, dynamic thresholds without user feedback, and dynamic thresholds with daily feedback. Our best technique takes advantage of daily feedback in a simple yet effective manner, achieving the best known result reported in the literature to date.