Event detection over twitter social media streams

Abstract

In recent years, microblogs have become an important source for reporting real-world events. A real-world occurrence reported in microblogs is also called a social event. Social events may hold critical materials that describe the situations during a crisis. In real applications, such as crisis management and decision making, monitoring the critical events over social streams will enable watch officers to analyze a whole situation that is a composite event, and make the right decision based on the detailed contexts such as what is happening, where an event is happening, and who are involved. Although there has been significant research effort on detecting a target event in social networks based on a single source, in crisis, we often want to analyze the composite events contributed by different social users. So far, the problem of integrating ambiguous views from different users is not well investigated. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework to detect composite social events over streams, which fully exploits the information of social data over multiple dimensions. Specifically, we first propose a graphical model called location-time constrained topic (LTT) to capture the content, time, and location of social messages. Using LTT, a social message is represented as a probability distribution over a set of topics by inference, and the similarity between two messages is measured by the distance between their distributions. Then, the events are identified by conducting efficient similarity joins over social media streams. To accelerate the similarity join, we also propose a variable dimensional extendible hash over social streams. We have conducted extensive experiments to prove the high effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.