Disastrous Event and Sub-Event Detection From Microblog Posts Using Bi-Clustering Method

Abstract

Social media has become a nondetachable part of our life, with the exponential growth of usage in the past decade. Social sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Weibo, etc., with their millions of user base, apart from being a source of entertainment, has proven to be a very useful mean for public opinion generation, news propagation and information broadcasting by authorities. Social media data analysis has been a popular research area for the past few years. Detecting subevents from social media posts to identify an unusual event that requires special attention, especially in a disaster situation, is one of the key researches in this domain. In this article, we have proposed a novel biclustering-based subevent detection method from the Twitter dataset for retrospective analysis of disaster events. First, we have clustered the data matrix using spectral co-clustering. Then we identified subevents (words) and formulated a ranking framework to find the top-ranked subevents within the clusters. Finally, through statistical analysis, we have shown that the proposed framework works better than other existing subevent detection methods.