Event Detection from Social Media Data

Microblogging platforms, such as Twitter, Tumblr etc., have been established as key components in the contemporary Web ecosystem. Users constantly post snippets of information regarding their actions, interests or perception of their surroundings, which is why they have been attributed the term Live Web. Nevertheless, research on such platforms has been quite limited when it comes to identifying events, but is rapidly gaining ground. Event identification is a key step to news reporting, proactive or reactive crisis management at multiple scales, efficient resource allocation, etc. In this paper, we focus on the problem of automatically identifying events as they occur, in such a user-driven, fast paced and voluminous setting. We propose a novel and natural way to address the issue using notions from emotional theories, combined with spatiotemporal information and employ online event detection mechanisms to solve it at large scale in a distributed fashion. We present a modular framework that incorporates these ideas and allows monitoring of the Twitter stream in real time.