Emerging topic detection on Twitter based on temporal and social terms evaluation

Abstract

Twitter is a user-generated content system that allows its users to share short text messages, called tweets, for a variety of purposes, including daily conversations, URLs sharing and information news. Considering its world-wide distributed network of users of any age and social condition, it represents a low level news flashes portal that, in its impressive short response time, has the principal advantage. In this paper we recognize this primary role of Twitter and we propose a novel topic detection technique that permits to retrieve in real-time the most emergent topics expressed by the community. First, we extract the contents (set of terms) of the tweets and model the term life cycle according to a novel aging theory intended to mine the emerging ones. A term can be defined as emerging if it frequently occurs in the specified time interval and it was relatively rare in the past. Moreover, considering that the importance of a content also depends on its source, we analyze the social relationships in the network with the well-known Page Rank algorithm in order to determine the authority of the users. Finally, we leverage a navigable topic graph which connects the emerging terms with other semantically related keywords, allowing the detection of the emerging topics, under user-specified time constraints. We provide different case studies which show the validity of the proposed approach. © 2010 ACM.