EvenTweet

Abstract

Microblogging services such as Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare have become major sources for information about real-world events. Most approaches that aim at extracting event information from such sources typically use the temporal context of messages. However, exploiting the location information of georeferenced messages, too, is important to detect localized events, such as public events or emergency situations. Users posting messages that are close to the location of an event serve as human sensors to describe an event. In this demonstration, we present a novel framework to detect localized events in real-time from a Twitter stream and to track the evolution of such events over time. For this, spatio-temporal characteristics of keywords are continuously extracted to identify meaningful candidates for event descriptions. Then, localized event information is extracted by clustering keywords according to their spatial similarity. To determine the most important events in a (recent) time frame, we introduce a scoring scheme for events. We demonstrate the functionality of our system, called Even-Tweet, using a stream of tweets from Europe during the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship.