A rule dynamics approach to event detection in Twitter with its application to sports and politics

The increasing popularity of Twitter as social network tool for opinion expression as well as informa- tion retrieval has resulted in the need to derive computational means to detect and track relevant top- ics/events in the network. The application of topic detection and tracking methods to tweets enable users to extract newsworthy content from the vast and somehow chaotic Twitter stream. In this paper, we ap- ply our technique named Transaction-based Rule Change Mining to extract newsworthy hashtag keywords present in tweets from two different domains namely; sports (The English FA Cup 2012) and politics (US Presidential Elections 2012 and Super Tuesday 2012). Noting the peculiar nature of event dynamics in these two domains, we apply different time-windows and update rates to each of the datasets in order to study their impact on performance. The performance effectiveness results reveal that our approach is able to accurately detect and track newsworthy content. In addition, the results show that the adaptation of the time-window exhibits better performance especially on the sports dataset, which can be attributed to the usually shorter duration of football events

Topic Detection and Tracking in Personal Search History

This thesis describes a system for tracking and detecting topics in personal search history. In particular, we developed a time tracking tool that helps users in analyzing their time and discovering their activity patterns. The system allows a user to specify interesting topics to monitor with a keyword description. The system would then keep track of the log and the time spent on each document and produce a time graph to show how much time has been spent on each topic to be monitored. The system can also detect new topics and potentially recommend relevant information about them to the user. This work has been integrated with the UCAIR Toolbar, a client side agent. Considering limited resources on the client side, we designed an e????cient incremental algorithm for topic tracking and detection. Various unsupervised learning approaches have been considered to improve the accuracy in categorizing the user log into appropriate categories. Experiments show that our tool is effective in categorizing the documents into existing categories and detecting the new useful catgeories. Moreover, the quality of categorization improves over time as more and more log is available

An association rule dynamics and classification approach to event detection and tracking in Twitter.

Twitter is a microblogging application used for sending and retrieving instant on-line messages of not more than 140 characters. There has been a surge in Twitter activities since its launch in 2006 as well as steady increase in event detection research on Twitter data (tweets) in recent years. With 284 million monthly active users Twitter has continued to grow both in size and activity. The network is rapidly changing the way global audience source for information and influence the process of journalism [Newman, 2009]. Twitter is now perceived as an information network in addition to being a social network. This explains why traditional news media follow activities on Twitter to enhance their news reports and news updates. Knowing the significance of the network as an information dissemination platform, news media subscribe to Twitter accounts where they post their news headlines and include the link to their on-line news where the full story may be found. Twitter users in some cases, post breaking news on the network before such news are published by traditional news media. This can be ascribed to Twitter subscribers' nearness to location of events. The use of Twitter as a network for information dissemination as well as for opinion expression by different entities is now common. This has also brought with it the issue of computational challenges of extracting newsworthy contents from Twitter noisy data. Considering the enormous volume of data Twitter generates, users append the hashtag (#) symbol as prefix to keywords in tweets. Hashtag labels describe the content of tweets. The use of hashtags also makes it easy to search for and read tweets of interest. The volume of Twitter streaming data makes it imperative to derive Topic Detection and Tracking methods to extract newsworthy topics from tweets. Since hashtags describe and enhance the readability of tweets, this research is developed to show how the appropriate use of hashtags keywords in tweets can demonstrate temporal evolvements of related topic in real-life and consequently enhance Topic Detection and Tracking on Twitter network. We chose to apply our method on Twitter network because of the restricted number of characters per message and for being a network that allows sharing data publicly. More importantly, our choice was based on the fact that hashtags are an inherent component of Twitter. To this end, the aim of this research is to develop, implement and validate a new approach that extracts newsworthy topics from tweets' hashtags of real-life topics over a specified period using Association Rule Mining. We termed our novel methodology Transaction-based Rule Change Mining (TRCM). TRCM is a system built on top of the Apriori method of Association Rule Mining to extract patterns of Association Rules changes in tweets hashtag keywords at different periods of time and to map the extracted keywords to related real-life topic or scenario. To the best of our knowledge, the adoption of dynamics of Association Rules of hashtag co-occurrences has not been explored as a Topic Detection and Tracking method on Twitter. The application of Apriori to hashtags present in tweets at two consecutive period t and t + 1 produces two association rulesets, which represents rules evolvement in the context of this research. A change in rules is discovered by matching every rule in ruleset at time t with those in ruleset at time t + 1. The changes are grouped under four identified rules namely 'New' rules, 'Unexpected Consequent' and 'Unexpected Conditional' rules, 'Emerging' rules and 'Dead' rules. The four rules represent different levels of topic real-life evolvements. For example, the emerging rule represents very important occurrence such as breaking news, while unexpected rules represents unexpected twist of event in an on-going topic. The new rule represents dissimilarity in rules in rulesets at time t and t+1. Finally, the dead rule represents topic that is no longer present on the Twitter network. TRCM revealed the dynamics of Association Rules present in tweets and demonstrates the linkage between the different types of rule dynamics to targeted real-life topics/events. In this research, we conducted experimental studies on tweets from different domains such as sports and politics to test the performance effectiveness of our method. We validated our method, TRCM with carefully chosen ground truth. The outcome of our research experiments include: Identification of 4 rule dynamics in tweets' hashtags namely: New rules, Emerging rules, Unexpected rules and 'Dead' rules using Association Rule Mining. These rules signify how news and events evolved in real-life scenario. Identification of rule evolvements on Twitter network using Rule Trend Analysis and Rule Trace. Detection and tracking of topic evolvements on Twitter using Transaction-based Rule Change Mining TRCM. Identification of how the peculiar features of each TRCM rules affect their performance effectiveness on real datasets

Neurocognitive Informatics Manifesto.

Informatics studies all aspects of the structure of natural and artificial information systems. Theoretical and abstract approaches to information have made great advances, but human information processing is still unmatched in many areas, including information management, representation and understanding. Neurocognitive informatics is a new, emerging field that should help to improve the matching of artificial and natural systems, and inspire better computational algorithms to solve problems that are still beyond the reach of machines. In this position paper examples of neurocognitive inspirations and promising directions in this area are given

Proceedings of Mathsport international 2017 conference

Proceedings of MathSport International 2017 Conference, held in the Botanical Garden of the University of Padua, June 26-28, 2017. MathSport International organizes biennial conferences dedicated to all topics where mathematics and sport meet. Topics include: performance measures, optimization of sports performance, statistics and probability models, mathematical and physical models in sports, competitive strategies, statistics and probability match outcome models, optimal tournament design and scheduling, decision support systems, analysis of rules and adjudication, econometrics in sport, analysis of sporting technologies, financial valuation in sport, e-sports (gaming), betting and sports

A KD framework in football data analytics: a value co-creation framework for the use of knowledge discovery technologies in the football industry

Investment in sport technologies are expected to grow by 40.1% during 2016-2022 reaching approximately $3.97 billion by 2022. As well the recent changes in technology regulations by The Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) since the 2018 World Cup created promising football technologies. This research questions addressing the issue of what is the value of such technologies for professional football teams? and what are the benefits of these technologies? This is achieved by developing a framework for understanding the value co-creation process from the knowledge discovery systems in the football industry. The framework aids in mapping the resources, pinpointing the outputs, identifying the competencies leading into capabilities, and finally in realisation of the value of the final outcomes in that journey. On another words, different teams have different resources that allow them to achieve certain outputs. These outputs enable the coaching team to achieve and maintain certain abilities. By changes in practice the will improve the team ability and enhance their analytical capabilities. Therefore, that will allow and aid the coaching team to gain new outcomes such as improving training strategies, transferring players, and informative match strategies. Additionally, improved understanding of the value co-creation process from the knowledge discovery systems in the football industry answering, why are some teams better able to gain value from investment in knowledge discovery technologies than other teams in the football industry. The framework has been developed in three phases in which semi-structured interviews where used in the first and second phases for developing and validating the framework respectively. The third and final phases is verifying the framework by developing a knowledge discovery maturity model as an online assessment s tool in operationalising the research findings. The main contributions of this research are the adaptation and customisation of Melville et al. (2004) to develop a value co-creation process form knowledge discovery resources. Moreover, applying Agile (APM, 2015) artefacts and techniques and tools in improving the value co-creation process between coaches and data analysts. That s aided in developing the value co-creation knowledge discovery framework in football analytics. Additionally, the development of a key performance indicators balanced scorecard and its adaptation as a in understanding the relationships between the key performance indicators (i.e. physical, psychological, technical and tactical performance indicators). Finally, the development of the knowledge discovery maturity model in football analytics which was used in understanding and pinpointing areas of strength and weakness in the utilisation of the various football resources used in football analytics (human resources, technological resources, value co-creation resources and analytical models used)