Comparing user generated content published in different social media sources

The growth of social media has populated the Web with valuable user generated content that can be exploited for many different and interesting purposes, such as, explaining or predicting real world outcomes through opinion mining. In this context, natural language processing techniques are a key technology for analysing user generated content. Such content is characterised by its casual language, with short texts, misspellings, and set-phrases, among other characteristics that challenge content analysis. This paper shows the differences of the language used in heterogeneous social media sources, by analysing the distribution of the part-of-speech categories extracted from the analysis of the morphology of a sample of texts published in such sources. In addition, we evaluate the performance of three natural language processing techniques (i.e., language identification, sentiment analysis, and topic identification) showing the differences on accuracy when applying such techniques to different types of user generated content.