Using Twitter to Detect and Tag Important Events in Live Sports

Abstract

In this paper we examine the effectiveness of using a filtered stream of tweets from Twitter to automatically identify events of interest within the video of live sports transmissions. We show that using just the volume of tweets generated at any moment of a game actually provides a very accurate means of event detection, as well as an automatic method for tagging events with representative words from the tweet stream. We compare this method with an alternative approach that uses complex audio-visual content analysis of the video, showing that it provides near-equivalent accuracy for major event detection at a fraction of the computational cost. Using community tweets and discussion also provides a sense of what the audience themselves found to be the talking points of a video.