Detection and Delineation of Events and Sub-Events in Social Networks

We define and solve the problem of event detection and delineation as a task of identifying events and decomposing them to their major sub-events, with a description and a timeline. We propose DeLi, an algorithm that focuses on providing such an understanding of events and sub-events. DeLi, to the best of our knowledge, is the first method that addresses the problem in a generic stream of text, and in an online fashion. Extensive evaluation on social streaming data demonstrates that, by combining the structure of a social network with content attributes, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques