Unsupervised keyword extraction from microblog posts via hashtags

© River Publishers. Nowadays, huge amounts of texts are being generated for social networking purposes on Web. Keyword extraction from such texts like microblog posts benefits many applications such as advertising, search, and content filtering. Unlike traditional web pages, a microblog post usually has some special social feature like a hashtag that is topical in nature and generated by users. Extracting keywords related to hashtags can reflect the intents of users and thus provides us better understanding on post content. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised keyword extraction approach for microblog posts by treating hashtags as topical indicators. Our approach consists of two hashtag enhanced algorithms. One is a topic model algorithm that infers topic distributions biased to hashtags on a collection of microblog posts. The words are ranked by their average topic probabilities. Our topic model algorithm can not only find the topics of a collection, but also extract hashtag-related keywords. The other is a random walk based algorithm. It first builds a word-post weighted graph by taking into account posts themselves. Then, a hashtag biased random walk is applied on this graph, which guides the algorithm to extract keywords according to hashtag topics. Last, the final ranking score of a word is determined by the stationary probability after a number of iterations. We evaluate our proposed approach on a collection of real Chinese microblog posts. Experiments show that our approach is more effective in terms of precision than traditional approaches considering no hashtag. The result achieved by the combination of two algorithms performs even better than each individual algorithm

Hashtag biased ranking for keyword extraction from microblog posts

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. Nowadays, a huge amount of text is being generated for social networking purpose on the Web. Keyword extraction from such text benefit many applications such as advertising, search, and content filtering. Recent studies show that graph based ranking is more effective than traditional term or document frequecy based approaches. However, most work in the literature constructs word to word graph within a document or a collection of documents before applying a kind of random walk. Such a graph does not consider the influence of document importance on keyword extraction. Moreover, social text like a microblog post usually has speical social features such as hashtag and so on, which can help us understand its topic. In this paper, we propose hashtag biased ranking for keyword extraction from a collection of microblog posts. We first build a word-post weighted graph by taking into account the posts themselves. Then, a hashtag biased random walk is applied on this graph, which guides our approach to extract keywords according to the hashtag topic. Last, the final ranking of a word is determined by the stationary probability after a number of interations. We evaluate our proposed method on a real Chinese microblog posts. Experiments show that our method is more effective than the traditional word to word graph based ranking in terms of precision

What’s Happening Around the World? A Survey and Framework on Event Detection Techniques on Twitter

© 2019, Springer Nature B.V. In the last few years, Twitter has become a popular platform for sharing opinions, experiences, news, and views in real-time. Twitter presents an interesting opportunity for detecting events happening around the world. The content (tweets) published on Twitter are short and pose diverse challenges for detecting and interpreting event-related information. This article provides insights into ongoing research and helps in understanding recent research trends and techniques used for event detection using Twitter data. We classify techniques and methodologies according to event types, orientation of content, event detection tasks, their evaluation, and common practices. We highlight the limitations of existing techniques and accordingly propose solutions to address the shortcomings. We propose a framework called EDoT based on the research trends, common practices, and techniques used for detecting events on Twitter. EDoT can serve as a guideline for developing event detection methods, especially for researchers who are new in this area. We also describe and compare data collection techniques, the effectiveness and shortcomings of various Twitter and non-Twitter-based features, and discuss various evaluation measures and benchmarking methodologies. Finally, we discuss the trends, limitations, and future directions for detecting events on Twitter

Can we predict a riot? Disruptive event detection using Twitter

In recent years, there has been increased interest in real-world event detection using publicly accessible data made available through Internet technology such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. In these highly interactive systems, the general public are able to post real-time reactions to “real world” events, thereby acting as social sensors of terrestrial activity. Automatically detecting and categorizing events, particularly small-scale incidents, using streamed data is a non-trivial task but would be of high value to public safety organisations such as local police, who need to respond accordingly. To address this challenge, we present an end-to-end integrated event detection framework that comprises five main components: data collection, pre-processing, classification, online clustering, and summarization. The integration between classification and clustering enables events to be detected, as well as related smaller-scale “disruptive events,” smaller incidents that threaten social safety and security or could disrupt social order. We present an evaluation of the effectiveness of detecting events using a variety of features derived from Twitter posts, namely temporal, spatial, and textual content. We evaluate our framework on a large-scale, real-world dataset from Twitter. Furthermore, we apply our event detection system to a large corpus of tweets posted during the August 2011 riots in England. We use ground-truth data based on intelligence gathered by the London Metropolitan Police Service, which provides a record of actual terrestrial events and incidents during the riots, and show that our system can perform as well as terrestrial sources, and even better in some cases

Adaptive Method for Following Dynamic Topics on Twitter

Many research social studies of public response on social media require following (i.e., tracking) topics on Twitter for long periods of time. The current approaches rely on streaming tweets based on some hashtags or keywords, or following some Twitter accounts. Such approaches lead to limited coverage of on-topic tweets. In this paper, we introduce a novel technique for following such topics in a more effective way. A topic is defined as a set of well-prepared queries that cover the static side of the topic. We propose an automatic approach that adapts to emerging aspects of a tracked broad topic over time. We tested our tracking approach on three broad dynamic topics that are hot in different categories: Egyptian politics, Syrian conflict, and international sports. We measured the effectiveness of our approach over four full days spanning a period of four months to ensure consistency in effectiveness. Experimental results showed that, on average, our approach achieved over 100 % increase in recall relative to the baseline Boolean approach, while maintaining an acceptable precision of 83%