Adaptive Representations for Tracking Breaking News on Twitter

Twitter is often the most up-to-date source for finding and tracking breaking news stories. Therefore, there is considerable interest in developing filters for tweet streams in order to track and summarize stories. This is a non-trivial text analytics task as tweets are short, and standard retrieval methods often fail as stories evolve over time. In this paper we examine the effectiveness of adaptive mechanisms for tracking and summarizing breaking news stories. We evaluate the effectiveness of these mechanisms on a number of recent news events for which manually curated timelines are available. Assessments based on ROUGE metrics indicate that an adaptive approaches are best suited for tracking evolving stories on Twitter.Comment: 8 Pag

A Survey of Location Prediction on Twitter

Locations, e.g., countries, states, cities, and point-of-interests, are central to news, emergency events, and people's daily lives. Automatic identification of locations associated with or mentioned in documents has been explored for decades. As one of the most popular online social network platforms, Twitter has attracted a large number of users who send millions of tweets on daily basis. Due to the world-wide coverage of its users and real-time freshness of tweets, location prediction on Twitter has gained significant attention in recent years. Research efforts are spent on dealing with new challenges and opportunities brought by the noisy, short, and context-rich nature of tweets. In this survey, we aim at offering an overall picture of location prediction on Twitter. Specifically, we concentrate on the prediction of user home locations, tweet locations, and mentioned locations. We first define the three tasks and review the evaluation metrics. By summarizing Twitter network, tweet content, and tweet context as potential inputs, we then structurally highlight how the problems depend on these inputs. Each dependency is illustrated by a comprehensive review of the corresponding strategies adopted in state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, we also briefly review two related problems, i.e., semantic location prediction and point-of-interest recommendation. Finally, we list future research directions.Comment: Accepted to TKDE. 30 pages, 1 figur

Describing and Understanding Neighborhood Characteristics through Online Social Media

Geotagged data can be used to describe regions in the world and discover local themes. However, not all data produced within a region is necessarily specifically descriptive of that area. To surface the content that is characteristic for a region, we present the geographical hierarchy model (GHM), a probabilistic model based on the assumption that data observed in a region is a random mixture of content that pertains to different levels of a hierarchy. We apply the GHM to a dataset of 8 million Flickr photos in order to discriminate between content (i.e., tags) that specifically characterizes a region (e.g., neighborhood) and content that characterizes surrounding areas or more general themes. Knowledge of the discriminative and non-discriminative terms used throughout the hierarchy enables us to quantify the uniqueness of a given region and to compare similar but distant regions. Our evaluation demonstrates that our model improves upon traditional Naive Bayes classification by 47% and hierarchical TF-IDF by 27%. We further highlight the differences and commonalities with human reasoning about what is locally characteristic for a neighborhood, distilled from ten interviews and a survey that covered themes such as time, events, and prior regional knowledgeComment: Accepted in WWW 2015, 2015, Florence, Ital

Continuous Representation of Location for Geolocation and Lexical Dialectology using Mixture Density Networks

We propose a method for embedding two-dimensional locations in a continuous vector space using a neural network-based model incorporating mixtures of Gaussian distributions, presenting two model variants for text-based geolocation and lexical dialectology. Evaluated over Twitter data, the proposed model outperforms conventional regression-based geolocation and provides a better estimate of uncertainty. We also show the effectiveness of the representation for predicting words from location in lexical dialectology, and evaluate it using the DARE dataset.Comment: Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2017) September 2017, Copenhagen, Denmar

"When and Where?": Behavior Dominant Location Forecasting with Micro-blog Streams

The proliferation of smartphones and wearable devices has increased the availability of large amounts of geospatial streams to provide significant automated discovery of knowledge in pervasive environments, but most prominent information related to altering interests have not yet adequately capitalized. In this paper, we provide a novel algorithm to exploit the dynamic fluctuations in user's point-of-interest while forecasting the future place of visit with fine granularity. Our proposed algorithm is based on the dynamic formation of collective personality communities using different languages, opinions, geographical and temporal distributions for finding out optimized equivalent content. We performed extensive empirical experiments involving, real-time streams derived from 0.6 million stream tuples of micro-blog comprising 1945 social person fusion with graph algorithm and feed-forward neural network model as a predictive classification model. Lastly, The framework achieves 62.10% mean average precision on 1,20,000 embeddings on unlabeled users and surprisingly 85.92% increment on the state-of-the-art approach.Comment: Accepted as a full paper in the 2nd International Workshop on Social Computing co-located with ICDM, 2018 Singapor

GIS Investigation of Crime Prediction with an Operationalized Tweet Corpus

Social media as the de facto communication channel is being used to disseminate one’s diurnal self-revelations. This profound discovery often contains double-talk, peculiar insights, or contextual information about real-world events. Natural language processing is regularly used to uncover both obvious and latent knowledge claims within disclosures published amid the complex environment. For example, a perpetrator with first-hand knowledge of their criminal incident uses social media to post critical information about it. A geographic information system (GIS) is capable of large-scale point data analysis and possesses methods that enable dataset processing, evaluation, and automatic spatial visualization. Such an artifact—fused with traditional environmental criminology theory and social media—erects guidelines, tools, and models for substantive construction and evaluation of GIS crime analysis solutions. Provided the social media stream is timely and correctly processed, corrective action can be taken. The construction of a natural language processing social media annotation pipe identifies latent indicators extracted from a social media corpus and is an integral part of societal mishap prediction. Spatial visualizations and regression analyses were used to describe and evaluate project artifacts. As a result, a social media corpus was operationalized, and subsequently used as a proxy for a traditional environmental criminology risk layer in construction of a social media GIS crime analysis artifact. Using such multi-domain collaboration, the artifact was able to increase the predictive crime incident outcome with an overall R-squared increase of 21.94%. This result is the state-of-the-art; there are no other results to compare it to