STED: semi-supervised targeted-interest event detectionin in twitter

Social microblogs such as Twitter and Weibo are experiencing an explosive growth with billions of global users sharing their daily observations and thoughts. Beyond public interests (e.g., sports, music), microblogs can provide highly detailed information for those interested in public health, homeland security, and financial analysis. However, the language used in Twitter is heavily informal, ungrammatical, and dynamic. Existing data mining algorithms require extensive manually labeling to build and maintain a supervised system. This paper presents STED, a semi-supervised system that helps users to automatically detect and interactively visualize events of a targeted type from twitter, such as crimes, civil unrests, and disease outbreaks. Our model first applies transfer learning and label propagation to automatically generate labeled data, then learns a customized text classifier based on mini-clustering, and finally applies fast spatial scan statistics to estimate the locations of events. We demonstrate STED's usage and benefits using twitter data collected from Latin America countries, and show how our system helps to detect and track example events such as civil unrests and crimes.