the-algorithm/RETREIVAL_SIGNALS.md

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Signals for Candidate Sources

Overview

The candidate sourcing stage within the Twitter Recommendation algorithm serves to significantly narrow down the item size from approximately 1 billion to just a few thousand. This process utilizes Twitter user behavior as the primary input for the algorithm. This document comprehensively enumerates all the signals during the candidate sourcing phase.

Signals Description
Author Follow The accounts which user explicit follows.
Author Unfollow The accounts which user recently unfollows.
Author Mute The accounts which user have muted.
Author Block The accounts which user have blocked
Tweet Favorite The tweets which user clicked the like botton.
Tweet Unfavorite The tweets which user clicked the unlike botton.
Retweet The tweets which user retweeted
Quote Tweet The tweets which user retweeted with comments.
Tweet Reply The tweets which user replied.
Tweet Share The tweets which user clicked the share botton.
Tweet Bookmark The tweets which user clicked the bookmark botton.
Tweet Click The tweets which user clicked and viewed the tweet detail page.
Tweet Video Watch The video tweets which user watched certain seconds or percentage.
Tweet Don't like The tweets which user clicked "Not interested in this tweet" botton.
Tweet Report The tweets which user clicked "Report Tweet" botton.
Notification Open The push notification tweets which user opened.
Ntab click The tweets which user click on the Notifications page.
User AddressBook The author accounts identifiers of the user's addressbook.

Usage Details

Twitter uses these user signals as training labels and/or ML features in the each candidate sourcing algorithms. The following tables shows how they are used in the each components.

Signals USS SimClusters TwHin UTEG FRS Light Ranking
Author Follow Features Features / Labels Features / Labels Features Features / Labels N/A
Author Unfollow Features N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Author Mute Features N/A N/A N/A Features N/A
Author Block Features N/A N/A N/A Features N/A
Tweet Favorite Features Features Features / Labels Features Features / Labels Features / Labels
Tweet Unfavorite Features Features N/A N/A N/A N/A
Retweet Features N/A Features / Labels Features Features / Labels Features / Labels
Quote Tweet Features N/A Features / Labels Features Features / Labels Features / Labels
Tweet Reply Features N/A Features Features Features / Labels Features
Tweet Share Features N/A N/A N/A Features N/A
Tweet Bookmark Features N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Tweet Click Features N/A N/A N/A Features Labels
Tweet Video Watch Features Features N/A N/A N/A Labels
Tweet Don't like Features N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Tweet Report Features N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Notification Open Features Features Features N/A Features N/A
Ntab click Features Features Features N/A Features N/A
User AddressBook N/A N/A N/A N/A Features N/A