Bursty Event Detection in Twitter Streams

Social media, in recent years, have become an invaluable source of information for both public and private organizations to enhance the comprehension of people interests and the onset of new events. Twitter, especially, allows a fast spread of news and events happening real time that can contribute to situation awareness during emergency situations, but also to understand trending topics of a period. The article proposes an online algorithm that incrementally groups tweet streams into clusters. The approach summarizes the examined tweets into the cluster centroid by maintaining a number of textual and temporal features that allow the method to effectively discover groups of interest on particular themes. Experiments on messages posted by users addressing different issues, and a comparison with state-of-the-art approaches show that the method is capable to detect discussions regarding topics of interest, but also to distinguish bursty events revealed by a sudden spreading of attention on messages published by users.