Learning to Discover Key Moments in Social Media Streams
Cody Buntain, Jimmy Lin, Jennifer Golbeck

TL;DR
LABurst is a machine learning-based method that detects key moments in social media streams across domains without prior knowledge, outperforming traditional methods in sports and earthquake detection.
Contribution
Introduces LABurst, a domain-agnostic, machine learning approach for identifying high-impact moments in social media streams without domain-specific data or seed keywords.
Findings
LABurst outperforms time series analysis baseline in sports event detection.
LABurst is competitive with domain-specific methods despite lacking domain knowledge.
LABurst detects earthquake events within two minutes of occurrence.
Abstract
This paper introduces LABurst, a general technique for identifying key moments, or moments of high impact, in social media streams without the need for domain-specific information or seed keywords. We leverage machine learning to model temporal patterns around bursts in Twitter's unfiltered public sample stream and build a classifier to identify tokens experiencing these bursts. We show LABurst performs competitively with existing burst detection techniques while simultaneously providing insight into and detection of unanticipated moments. To demonstrate our approach's potential, we compare two baseline event-detection algorithms with our language-agnostic algorithm to detect key moments across three major sporting competitions: 2013 World Series, 2014 Super Bowl, and 2014 World Cup. Our results show LABurst outperforms a time series analysis baseline and is competitive with a…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsComplex Network Analysis Techniques · Public Relations and Crisis Communication · Advanced Text Analysis Techniques
