Application of fuzzy semantic similarity measures to event detection within tweets

This paper examines the suitability of applying fuzzy semantic similarity measures (FSSM) to the task of detecting potential future events through the use of a group of prototypical event tweets. FSSM are ideal measures to be used to analyse the semantic textual content of tweets due to the ability to deal equally with not only nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, but also perception based fuzzy words. The proposed methodology first creates a set of prototypical event related tweets and a control group of tweets from a data source, then calculates the semantic similarity against an event dataset compiled from tweets issued during the 2011 London riots. The dataset of tweets contained a proportion of tweets that the Guardian Newspaper publically released that were attributed to 200 influential Twitter users during the actual riot. The effects of changing the semantic similarity threshold are investigated in order to evaluate if Twitter tweets can be used in conjunction with fuzzy short text similarity measures and prototypical event related tweets to determine if an event is more likely to occur. By looking at the increase in frequency of tweets in the dataset, over a certain similarity threshold when matched with prototypical event tweets about riots, the results have shown that a potential future event can be detected.