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Finding non-redundant multi-word events on twitter

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

Twitter is a pervasive technology, with hundreds of millions of users serving as sensors that provide eyewitness accounts of events on the ground. In case of popular events, these sensors start to broadcast news by tweeting to their followers, and to the world. Within minutes these tweets can attract attention and also serve as a primary information source for traditional media. Given a huge set of tweets, the key questions are: (1) How can we detect informative events in general? (2) How can we distinguish relevant events from others? In this paper we tackle these challenges with a statistical model for detecting events by spotting significant frequency deviations of the words' frequency over time. Besides single word events, our model also accounts for events composed of multiple co-occurring words, thus, providing much richer information. Our statistical process is complemented with an optimization algorithm to extract only non-redundant events, overall, providing the user with a succinct summary of the current events. We used our model to analyze 24 million geotagged tweets that have been sent in the US from April 9 to April 22, 2013 - the time period of the Boston marathon bombing - and we show that our approach can create multi-word events that efficiently summarize real-world events.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2015 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2015
EditorsJian Pei, Jie Tang, Fabrizio Silvestri
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages520-525
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781450338547
DOIs
StatePublished - 25 Aug 2015
Externally publishedYes
EventIEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2015 - Paris, France
Duration: 25 Aug 201528 Aug 2015

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2015 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2015

Conference

ConferenceIEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2015
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityParis
Period25/08/1528/08/15

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