rafaveguim / twitter-dialog-hunter

Listens to the Streaming API and finds dialogs in timelines.

Twitter Dialog Hunter

This Python script uses the Twitter API and BeautifulSoup to find and download dialogs from Twitter. It is built on top of the collect_twitter_dialogs module from DSTC6-End-to-End-Conversation-Modeling.

It is meant to overcome some limitations of the DSTC6 module and other scrapers. The script doesn't require a list of source accounts, and for the most part avoids rate-limiting by scraping public urls. You can define the desired range of dialog length, and scale the execution across cores and treads.

Preparation

1. create a twitter account if you don't have it.

   you can get it via https://twitter.com/signup

2. create your application account via the Twitter

   Developer's Site: https://dev.twitter.com/

   see https://iag.me/socialmedia/how-to-create-a-twitter-app-in-8-easy-steps/

   for reference, and keep the following keys

   • Consumer Key
   • Consumer Secret
   • Access Token
   • Access Token Secret

3. edit ./config.ini to set your access keys in the config file

   • ConsumerKey
   • ConsumerSecret
   • AccessToken
   • AccessTokenSecret

4. install dependencies

   $ pip install -r requirements.txt
   

How to use:

python getdialogs.py --help

If you need dialogs with 4 to 6 turns, for example:

python getdialogs.py \
      --min_length=4 \
      --max_length=6 \
      output.csv

The script will collect data until interrupted (Ctrl+c). It will periodically save the collected dialogs to the informed path, which is output.csv above. Dialogs are appended to the output file, so it's OK to stop and restart the script later. Previous results will not be lost.

You can inform the path to a custom config file with --config. This is useful for when you have many sets of credentials. Each run can use a different set to avoid rate-limiting.

Resource Balancing

By default, the script tries to maximize the use of resources by splitting the workload among processes. The number of such processes can be set with --max_processes. By default, this is set to the number of cores available in the machine. This may be the best setting if running in a dedicated node. If you're running the script casually in a laptop, a less aggressive value for this setting should be more appropriate.

Similarly you can set the maximum number of threads to be used by each process in --max_threads. This value should be carefully chosen. If too high (e.g. 10), the threads will compete with the thread that listens to the Streaming API, causing it to fall behind. When a client fails to keep up with the stream, Twitter disconnects it.

Duplicates

The script does not guarantee the conversations are unique. If a user appears twice in the stream, then her dialogs will be collected twice.

To guarantee uniqueness of the conversations, it's better to run a second script to remove duplicates. A Bloom Filter can help scaling this task. There's a good one written in Python.