Event Identification in Social Networks
This is an incremental review article summarizing existing methods for event detection in social networks, addressing challenges in processing informal data for monitoring and summarizing information.
The paper tackles the problem of identifying emerging events in social networks, where traditional methods are ineffective due to short, noisy, and informal posts, and it provides an overview of state-of-the-art techniques that exploit abundant social network information.
Social networks enable users to freely communicate with each other and share their recent news, ongoing activities or views about different topics. As a result, they can be seen as a potentially viable source of information to understand the current emerging topics/events. The ability to model emerging topics is a substantial step to monitor and summarize the information originating from social sources. Applying traditional methods for event detection which are often proposed for processing large, formal and structured documents, are less effective, due to the short length, noisiness and informality of the social posts. Recent event detection techniques address these challenges by exploiting the opportunities behind abundant information available in social networks. This article provides an overview of the state of the art in event detection from social networks.