Social event classification via boosted multimodal supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Abstract

With the rapidly increasing popularity of social media sites (e.g., Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook), it is convenient for users to share their own comments on many social events, which successfully facilitates social event generation, sharing and propagation and results in a large amount of user-contributed media data (e.g., images, videos, and text) for a wide variety of real-world events of different types and scales. As a consequence, it has become more and more difficult to exactly find the interesting events from massive social media data, which is useful to browse, search and monitor social events by users or governments. To deal with these issues, we propose a novel boosted multimodal supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (BMM-SLDA) for social event classification by integrating a supervised topic model, denoted as multi-modal supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (mm-SLDA), in the boosting framework. Our proposed BMM-SLDA has a number of advantages. (1) Our mm-SLDA can effectively exploit the multimodality and the multiclass property of social events jointly, and make use of the supervised category label information to classify multiclass social event directly. (2) It is suitable for large-scale data analysis by utilizing boosting weighted sampling strategy to iteratively select a small subset of data to efficiently train the corresponding topic models. (3) It effectively exploits social event structure by the document weight distribution with classification error and can iteratively learn new topic model to correct the previously misclassified event documents. We evaluate our BMM-SLDA on a real world dataset and show extensive experimental results, which demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods.