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.
The is a normalized word frequency metric, similar to the @math metric, for identifying words that are particular to a fixed length time window and not salient in others. However, individual words may not always be sufficient to describe complex events because of the possible ambiguity and the lack of context. To cope with this, @cite_6 propose a different normalized frequency metric, , for identifying event-related n-grams. For a given n-gram and time window, it consists in computing the normalized frequency, @math , of that n-gram with regard to the frequency of the other n-grams in this window. The of a n-gram in a particular time window is then obtained by normalizing the value of @math in this time window with regard to the values calculated in the others.
@cite_6
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Statistical approaches to automatic text summarization based on term frequency continue to perform on par with more complex summarization methods. To compute useful frequency statistics, however, the semantically important words must be separated from the low-content function words. The standard approach of using an a priori stopword list tends to result in both undercoverage, where syntactical words are seen as semantically relevant, and overcoverage, where words related to content are ignored. We present a generative probabilistic modeling approach to building content distributions for use with statistical multi-document summarization where the syntax words are learned directly from the data with a Hidden Markov Model and are thereby deemphasized in the term frequency statistics. This approach is compared to both a stopword-list and POS-tagging approach and our method demonstrates improved coverage on the DUC 2006 and TAC 2010 datasets using the ROUGE metric.