Leveraging burst in twitter network communities for event detection

Abstract

Detecting protest events using social media is an important task with many useful applications to emergency services, law enforcement agencies, and other stakeholders. A plethora of research on event detection using social media has presented myriad approaches relying on tweet contents (text) to solve the event detection problem, with notable improvements over time. Despite the myriad of existing research, the use of the structural relationships among users in online Twitter network communities for event detection is rarely observed. In this work, we present a novel protest event detection framework called SensorTree. SensorTree utilizes the network structural connections among users in a community for protest event detection. The SensorTree framework tracks information propagation in Twitter network communities to model the sudden change in growth of these communities as burst for event detection. Once burst is detected, SensorTree builds a tensorized topic model to extract events. To show the prowess of SensorTree for event detection, we conduct extensive experiments on geographically diverse Twitter datasets using qualitative and quantitative evaluations. We further show the superiority of SensorTree by comparing our results to several existing state-of-the-art methods. SensorTree outperforms the baselines as well as the comparison models. The results further suggest that utilizing network community structure yields concise and accurate event detection. We also present case studies on real-world protest event to further show that SensorTree is capable of detecting events with fine granularity description without any language restrictions.