5,292 research outputs found
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
A System for Crowd Oriented Event Detection, Tracking, and Summarization in Social Media
In this research thesis, we investigate new methods for crowd-oriented event detection in social media (specifically Twitter). Specifically, we describe, evaluate, and suggest content based methods of extracting features that define events occurring in social media streams. Content-based methods examine the appearance of event-describing keywords, topical words, in a stream of tweets. With these aggregated features, tweets are then clustered using a parallelized version of canopy and k-means clustering in order to find groups of “similar” tweets which represent events. Tracking of events through time is done by evaluating the similarity of events in consecutive time periods. The effectiveness of the feature extraction stage is determined by the relevance of tweets to one another in event summaries. Our experiments aim toward finding the optimal parameters for feature extraction and event clustering
Scalable distributed event detection for Twitter
Social media streams, such as Twitter, have shown themselves to be useful sources of real-time information about what is happening in the world. Automatic detection and tracking of events identified in these streams have a variety of real-world applications, e.g. identifying and automatically reporting road accidents for emergency services. However, to be useful, events need to be identified within the stream with a very low latency. This is challenging due to the high volume of posts within these social streams. In this paper, we propose a novel event detection approach that can both effectively detect events within social streams like Twitter and can scale to thousands of posts every second. Through experimentation on a large Twitter dataset, we show that our approach can process the equivalent to the full Twitter Firehose stream, while maintaining event detection accuracy and outperforming an alternative distributed event detection system
Tracking Dengue Epidemics using Twitter Content Classification and Topic Modelling
Detecting and preventing outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases such as Dengue
and Zika in Brasil and other tropical regions has long been a priority for
governments in affected areas. Streaming social media content, such as Twitter,
is increasingly being used for health vigilance applications such as flu
detection. However, previous work has not addressed the complexity of drastic
seasonal changes on Twitter content across multiple epidemic outbreaks. In
order to address this gap, this paper contrasts two complementary approaches to
detecting Twitter content that is relevant for Dengue outbreak detection,
namely supervised classification and unsupervised clustering using topic
modelling. Each approach has benefits and shortcomings. Our classifier achieves
a prediction accuracy of about 80\% based on a small training set of about
1,000 instances, but the need for manual annotation makes it hard to track
seasonal changes in the nature of the epidemics, such as the emergence of new
types of virus in certain geographical locations. In contrast, LDA-based topic
modelling scales well, generating cohesive and well-separated clusters from
larger samples. While clusters can be easily re-generated following changes in
epidemics, however, this approach makes it hard to clearly segregate relevant
tweets into well-defined clusters.Comment: Procs. SoWeMine - co-located with ICWE 2016. 2016, Lugano,
Switzerlan
Clustering Memes in Social Media
The increasing pervasiveness of social media creates new opportunities to
study human social behavior, while challenging our capability to analyze their
massive data streams. One of the emerging tasks is to distinguish between
different kinds of activities, for example engineered misinformation campaigns
versus spontaneous communication. Such detection problems require a formal
definition of meme, or unit of information that can spread from person to
person through the social network. Once a meme is identified, supervised
learning methods can be applied to classify different types of communication.
The appropriate granularity of a meme, however, is hardly captured from
existing entities such as tags and keywords. Here we present a framework for
the novel task of detecting memes by clustering messages from large streams of
social data. We evaluate various similarity measures that leverage content,
metadata, network features, and their combinations. We also explore the idea of
pre-clustering on the basis of existing entities. A systematic evaluation is
carried out using a manually curated dataset as ground truth. Our analysis
shows that pre-clustering and a combination of heterogeneous features yield the
best trade-off between number of clusters and their quality, demonstrating that
a simple combination based on pairwise maximization of similarity is as
effective as a non-trivial optimization of parameters. Our approach is fully
automatic, unsupervised, and scalable for real-time detection of memes in
streaming data.Comment: Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances
in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM'13), 201
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