An Approximate Model for Event Detection from Twitter Data

Abstract

The abundance and real-time availability of Twitter data have proved beneficial in detecting events in various domains such as emergency situations, crime detection, public health, place recommendations, etc. Nevertheless, two critical challenges occur while detecting events using social media data. First, the uncertainty in capturing the contextual relationship among tweets, which is the result of the limited availability of the contextual information due to the small length of tweets. Second, the high computation cost required in event detection due to massive data processing. Earlier research works, addressing these challenges, have tried to capture the contextual information by using the dense vector representations of texts leveraging deep neural word embedding generation models such as Word2Vec and GloVe. However, these models are trained on the Euclidean vector space which fails to amalgamate the directional information of the vectors with the semantic information in text, incurring high computational costs. To target both the problems simultaneously, we propose modeling Twitter data as a graph-of-sentences which retains the contextual relationships while maintaining lower computational cost. The proposed model captures contextual information using JoSE, a spherical vector representation leveraging the word-word and word-paragraph semantic co-occurrence statistics in a spherical generative model. Furthermore, the framework uses the weighted-graph model to capture all the relationships among the Twitter data efficiently. The graph is further pruned with the help of the graph component filtering approach. The graph clustering model, employed to detect the events, leverages the edge weights and the partial-k clustering approach maintaining low computation costs. The experimentation on the annotated benchmark Twitter data set and the real-world datasets show improved run-time performance up to 30% while maintaining the qualitative performance (F1-score) comparable to the state-of-the-art models.