ED-SWE: Event detection based on scoring and word embedding in online social networks for the internet of people

Abstract

Online social media networks are gaining attention worldwide, with an increasing number of people relying on them to connect, communicate and share their daily pertinent event-related information. Event detection is now increasingly leveraging online social networks for highlighting events happening around the world via the Internet of People. In this paper, a novel Event Detection model based on Scoring and Word Embedding (ED-SWE) is proposed for discovering key events from a large volume of data streams of tweets and for generating an event summary using keywords and top-k tweets. The proposed ED-SWE model can distill high-quality tweets, reduce the negative impact of the advent of spam, and identify latent events in the data streams automatically. Moreover, a word embedding algorithm is used to learn a real-valued vector representation for a predefined fixed-sized vocabulary from a corpus of Twitter data. In order to further improve the performance of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) iteration algorithm, a novel initialization method based on the authority values of the tweets is also proposed in this paper to detect live events efficiently and precisely. Finally, a novel automatic identification method based on the cosine measure is used to automatically evaluate whether a given topic can form a live event. Experiments conducted on a real-world dataset demonstrate that the ED-SWE model exhibits better efficiency and accuracy than several state-of-art event detection models.