MaTED: Metadata-Assisted Twitter Event Detection System

Abstract

Due to its asynchronous message-sharing and real-time capabilities, Twitter offers a valuable opportunity to detect events in a timely manner. Existing approaches for event detection have mainly focused on building a temporal profile of named entities and detecting unusually large bursts in their usage to signify an event. We extend this line of research by incorporating external knowledge bases such as DBPedia, WordNet; and exploiting specific features of Twitter for efficient event detection. We show that our system utilizing temporal, social, and Twitter-specific features yields improvement in the precision, recall, and DERate on the benchmarked Events2012 corpus compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.