GeoBurst+: Effective and Real-Time Local Event Detection in Geo-Tagged Tweet Streams

The real-time discovery of local events (e.g., protests, disasters) has been widely recognized as a fundamental socioeconomic task. Recent studies have demonstrated that the geo-tagged tweet stream serves as an unprecedentedly valuable source for local event detection. Nevertheless, how to effectively extract local events from massive geo-tagged tweet streams in real time remains challenging. To bridge the gap, we propose a method for effective and real-time local event detection from geo-tagged tweet streams. Our method, named GeoBurst+, first leverages a novel cross-modal authority measure to identify several pivots in the query window. Such pivots reveal different geo-topical activities and naturally attract similar tweets to form candidate events. GeoBurst+ further summarizes the continuous stream and compares the candidates against the historical summaries to pinpoint truly interesting local events. Better still, as the query window shifts, GeoBurst+ is capable of updating the event list with little time cost, thus achieving continuous monitoring of the stream. We used crowdsourcing to evaluate GeoBurst+ on two million-scale datasets and found it significantly more effective than existing methods while being orders of magnitude faster.