Detecting and Tracking Significant Events for Individuals on Twitter by Monitoring the Evolution of Twitter Followership Networks

Abstract

People publish tweets on Twitter to share everything from global news to their daily life. Abundant user-generated content makes Twitter become one of the major channels for people to obtain information about real-world events. Event detection techniques help to extract events from massive amounts of Twitter data. However, most existing techniques are based on Twitter information streams, which contain plenty of noise and polluted content that would affect the accuracy of the detecting result. In this article, we present an event discovery method based on the change of the user’s followers, which can detect the occurrences of significant events relevant to the particular user. We divide these events into categories according to the positive or negative effect on the specific user. Further, we observe the evolution of individuals’ followership networks and analyze the dynamics of networks. The results show that events have different effects on the evolution of different features of Twitter followership networks. Our findings may play an important role for realizing how patterns of social interaction are impacted by events and can be applied in fields such as public opinion monitoring, disaster warning, crisis management, and intelligent decision making.