Text mining in social media for security threats

Abstract

We discuss techniques for information extraction from texts, and present two applications that use these techniques. We focus in particular on social media texts (Twitter messages), which present challenges for the information extraction techniques because they are noisy and short. The first application is extracting the locations mentioned in Twittermessages, and the second one is detecting the location of the users based on all the tweets written by each user. The same techniques can be used for extracting other kinds of information from social media texts, with the purpose ofmonitoring the topics, events, emotions, or locations of interest to security and defence applications.