Extracting News Events from Microblogs

Twitter stream has become a large source of information for many people, but the magnitude of tweets and the noisy nature of its content have made harvesting the knowledge from Twitter a challenging task for researchers for a long time. Aiming at overcoming some of the main challenges of extracting the hidden information from tweet streams, this work proposes a new approach for real-time detection of news events from the Twitter stream. We divide our approach into three steps. The first step is to use a neural network or deep learning to detect news-relevant tweets from the stream. The second step is to apply a novel streaming data clustering algorithm to the detected news tweets to form news events. The third and final step is to rank the detected events based on the size of the event clusters and growth speed of the tweet frequencies. We evaluate the proposed system on a large, publicly available corpus of annotated news events from Twitter. As part of the evaluation, we compare our approach with a related state-of-the-art solution. Overall, our experiments and user-based evaluation show that our approach on detecting current (real) news events delivers a state-of-the-art performance

Extracting semantic entities and events from sports tweets

Large volumes of user-generated content on practically every major issue and event are being created on the microblogging site Twitter. This content can be combined and processed to detect events, entities and popular moods to feed various knowledge-intensive practical applications. On the downside, these content items are very noisy and highly informal, making it difficult to extract sense out of the stream. In this paper, we exploit various approaches to detect the named entities and significant micro-events from users’ tweets during a live sports event. Here we describe how combining linguistic features with background knowledge and the use of Twitter-specific features can achieve high, precise detection results (f-measure = 87%) in different datasets. A study was conducted on tweets from cricket matches in the ICC World Cup in order to augment the event-related non-textual media with collective intelligence