The ever-growing number of people using Twitter makes it a valuable source of timely information. However, detecting events in Twitter is a difficult task, because tweets that report interesting events are overwhelmed by a large volume of tweets on unrelated topics. Existing methods focus on the textual content of tweets and ignore the social aspect of Twitter. In this paper, we propose mention-anomaly-based event detection (MABED), a novel statistical method that relies solely on tweets and leverages the creation frequency of dynamic links (i.e., mentions) that users insert in tweets to detect significant events and estimate the magnitude of their impact over the crowd. MABED also differs from the literature in that it dynamically estimates the period of time during which each event is discussed, rather than assuming a predefined fixed duration for all events. The experiments we conducted on both English and French Twitter data show that the mention-anomaly-based approach leads to more accurate event detection and improved robustness in presence of noisy Twitter content. Qualitatively speaking, we find that MABED helps with the interpretation of detected events by providing clear textual descriptions and precise temporal descriptions. We also show how MABED can help understanding users’ interest. Furthermore, we describe three visualizations designed to favor an efficient exploration of the detected events.
is among the first tools developed for visualizing events from tweets. It displays a single word cloud that describes all the detected events, as well as a single stacked area chart that plots the evolution of the relative volume of tweets for each event. @cite_15 propose , a system that allows for a finer understanding of the detected events in comparison with . It displays a list of events, each event being described by a set of words and a chart that plots the evolution of the volume of related tweets. is a tool that offers similar functionalities with more sophisticated visualizations, such as word clouds to describe events instead of sets of words. @cite_1 describe , a tool whose interface revolves around a timeline of events. The user can click an event to see the tweets published during the related time interval, or to see the most cited URLs in these tweets. Let us also mention work by @cite_2 , in which a heatmap describes the distribution of events across time.
@cite_15 @cite_1 @cite_2
2128721751 2067344105 2168400688 2743969099
Microblogs are a tremendous repository of user-generated content about world events. However, for people trying to understand events by querying services like Twitter, a chronological log of posts makes it very difficult to get a detailed understanding of an event. In this paper, we present TwitInfo, a system for visualizing and summarizing events on Twitter. TwitInfo allows users to browse a large collection of tweets using a timeline-based display that highlights peaks of high tweet activity. A novel streaming algorithm automatically discovers these peaks and labels them meaningfully using text from the tweets. Users can drill down to subevents, and explore further via geolocation, sentiment, and popular URLs. We contribute a recall-normalized aggregate sentiment visualization to produce more honest sentiment overviews. An evaluation of the system revealed that users were able to reconstruct meaningful summaries of events in a small amount of time. An interview with a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist suggested that the system would be especially useful for understanding a long-running event and for identifying eyewitnesses. Quantitatively, our system can identify 80-100 of manually labeled peaks, facilitating a relatively complete view of each event studied. We are interested in organizing a continuous stream of sparse and noisy texts, known as "tweets", in real time into an ontology of hundreds of topics with measurable and stringently high precision. This inference is performed over a full-scale stream of Twitter data, whose statistical distribution evolves rapidly over time. The implementation in an industrial setting with the potential of affecting and being visible to real users made it necessary to overcome a host of practical challenges. We present a spectrum of topic modeling techniques that contribute to a deployed system. These include non-topical tweet detection, automatic labeled data acquisition, evaluation with human computation, diagnostic and corrective learning and, most importantly, high-precision topic inference. The latter represents a novel two-stage training algorithm for tweet text classification and a close-loop inference mechanism for combining texts with additional sources of information. The resulting system achieves 93 precision at substantial overall coverage. Event detection from tweets is an important task to understand the current events topics attracting a large number of common users. However, the unique characteristics of tweets (e.g. short and noisy content, diverse and fast changing topics, and large data volume) make event detection a challenging task. Most existing techniques proposed for well written documents (e.g. news articles) cannot be directly adopted. In this paper, we propose a segment-based event detection system for tweets, called Twevent. Twevent first detects bursty tweet segments as event segments and then clusters the event segments into events considering both their frequency distribution and content similarity. More specifically, each tweet is split into non-overlapping segments (i.e. phrases possibly refer to named entities or semantically meaningful information units). The bursty segments are identified within a fixed time window based on their frequency patterns, and each bursty segment is described by the set of tweets containing the segment published within that time window. The similarity between a pair of bursty segments is computed using their associated tweets. After clustering bursty segments into candidate events, Wikipedia is exploited to identify the realistic events and to derive the most newsworthy segments to describe the identified events. We evaluate Twevent and compare it with the state-of-the-art method using 4.3 million tweets published by Singapore-based users in June 2010. In our experiments, Twevent outperforms the state-of-the-art method by a large margin in terms of both precision and recall. More importantly, the events detected by Twevent can be easily interpreted with little background knowledge because of the newsworthy segments. We also show that Twevent is efficient and scalable, leading to a desirable solution for event detection from tweets. Detecting local events (e.g., protest, disaster) at their onsets is an important task for a wide spectrum of applications, ranging from disaster control to crime monitoring and place recommendation. Recent years have witnessed growing interest in leveraging geo-tagged tweet streams for online local event detection. Nevertheless, the accuracies of existing methods still remain unsatisfactory for building reliable local event detection systems. We propose TrioVecEvent, a method that leverages multimodal embeddings to achieve accurate online local event detection. The effectiveness of TrioVecEvent is underpinned by its two-step detection scheme. First, it ensures a high coverage of the underlying local events by dividing the tweets in the query window into coherent geo-topic clusters. To generate quality geo-topic clusters, we capture short-text semantics by learning multimodal embeddings of the location, time, and text, and then perform online clustering with a novel Bayesian mixture model. Second, TrioVecEvent considers the geo-topic clusters as candidate events and extracts a set of features for classifying the candidates. Leveraging the multimodal embeddings as background knowledge, we introduce discriminative features that can well characterize local events, which enables pinpointing true local events from the candidate pool with a small amount of training data. We have used crowdsourcing to evaluate TrioVecEvent, and found that it improves the performance of the state-of-the-art method by a large margin.