Abstract
The large number of messages on Twitter posted each day provide rich insights into real-world events and public opinion. However, it is difficult to automatically distinguish tweets referring to such events from everyday chatter, and subsequently to distinguish significant events affecting many people from insignificant events. We apply a term-pivot approach to event detection from the Twitter stream. In order to filter out noisy and mundane events, we train a machine learning classifier on several rich features, and rank the events based on classifier confidence. After training and re-training the classifier using manually annotated data, we obtain an Fβ=1 score of 0.79. However, a baseline that only takes into account the frequency of the tweets that refer to an event yields a better Fβ=1 score of 0.86. We argue that performance is highly related to the definition of what makes a significant event, and that human understanding of this concept is not uniform.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 65-72 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | Belgian/Netherlands Artificial Intelligence Conference |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2014 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | 26th Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence, BNAIC 2014 - Nijmegen, Netherlands Duration: 6 Nov 2014 → 7 Nov 2014 |