The Early Bird Catches The Term: Combining Twitter and News Data For Event Detection and Situational Awareness

Twitter updates now represent an enormous stream of information originating from a wide variety of formal and informal sources, much of which is relevant to real-world events. In this paper we adapt existing bio-surveillance algorithms to detect localised spikes in Twitter activity corresponding to real events with a high level of confidence. We then develop a methodology to automatically summarise these events, both by providing the tweets which fully describe the event and by linking to highly relevant news articles. We apply our methods to outbreaks of illness and events strongly affecting sentiment. In both case studies we are able to detect events verifiable by third party sources and produce high quality summaries

Discovering conversational topics and emotions associated with Demonetization tweets in India

Social media platforms contain great wealth of information which provides us opportunities explore hidden patterns or unknown correlations, and understand people's satisfaction with what they are discussing. As one showcase, in this paper, we summarize the data set of Twitter messages related to recent demonetization of all Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes in India and explore insights from Twitter's data. Our proposed system automatically extracts the popular latent topics in conversations regarding demonetization discussed in Twitter via the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) based topic model and also identifies the correlated topics across different categories. Additionally, it also discovers people's opinions expressed through their tweets related to the event under consideration via the emotion analyzer. The system also employs an intuitive and informative visualization to show the uncovered insight. Furthermore, we use an evaluation measure, Normalized Mutual Information (NMI), to select the best LDA models. The obtained LDA results show that the tool can be effectively used to extract discussion topics and summarize them for further manual analysis.Comment: 6 pages, 11 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1608.02519 by other authors; text overlap with arXiv:1705.08094 by other author

Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)

The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017

Connotation Frames: A Data-Driven Investigation

Through a particular choice of a predicate (e.g., "x violated y"), a writer can subtly connote a range of implied sentiments and presupposed facts about the entities x and y: (1) writer's perspective: projecting x as an "antagonist"and y as a "victim", (2) entities' perspective: y probably dislikes x, (3) effect: something bad happened to y, (4) value: y is something valuable, and (5) mental state: y is distressed by the event. We introduce connotation frames as a representation formalism to organize these rich dimensions of connotation using typed relations. First, we investigate the feasibility of obtaining connotative labels through crowdsourcing experiments. We then present models for predicting the connotation frames of verb predicates based on their distributional word representations and the interplay between different types of connotative relations. Empirical results confirm that connotation frames can be induced from various data sources that reflect how people use language and give rise to the connotative meanings. We conclude with analytical results that show the potential use of connotation frames for analyzing subtle biases in online news media.Comment: 11 pages, published in Proceedings of ACL 201