What is Twitter

This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past two decades, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artifical intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of nlp, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.

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Survey of the state of the art in natural language generation: core tasks, applications and evaluation

Twitter has received much attention recently. An important characteristic of Twitter is its real-time nature. We investigate the real-time interaction of events such as earthquakes in Twitter and propose an algorithm to monitor tweets and to detect a target event. To detect a target event, we devise a classifier of tweets based on features such as the keywords in a tweet, the number of words, and their context. Subsequently, we produce a probabilistic spatiotemporal model for the target event that can find the center of the event location. We regard each Twitter user as a sensor and apply particle filtering, which are widely used for location estimation. The particle filter works better than other comparable methods for estimating the locations of target events. As an application, we develop an earthquake reporting system for use in Japan. Because of the numerous earthquakes and the large number of Twitter users throughout the country, we can detect an earthquake with high probability (93 percent of earthquakes of Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) seismic intensity scale 3 or more are detected) merely by monitoring tweets. Our system detects earthquakes promptly and notification is delivered much faster than JMA broadcast announcements.

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Tweet Analysis for Real-Time Event Detection and Earthquake Reporting System Development

Social networks have been recently employed as a source of information for event detection, with particular reference to road traffic congestion and car accidents. In this paper, we present a real-time monitoring system for traffic event detection from Twitter stream analysis. The system fetches tweets from Twitter according to several search criteria; processes tweets, by applying text mining techniques; and finally performs the classification of tweets. The aim is to assign the appropriate class label to each tweet, as related to a traffic event or not. The traffic detection system was employed for real-time monitoring of several areas of the Italian road network, allowing for detection of traffic events almost in real time, often before online traffic news web sites. We employed the support vector machine as a classification model, and we achieved an accuracy value of 95.75% by solving a binary classification problem (traffic versus nontraffic tweets). We were also able to discriminate if traffic is caused by an external event or not, by solving a multiclass classification problem and obtaining an accuracy value of 88.89%.

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Real-Time Detection of Traffic From Twitter Stream Analysis

Twitter has been used as one of the communication channels for spreading breaking news. We propose a method to collect, group, rank and track breaking news in Twitter. Since short length messages make similarity comparison difficult, we boost scores on proper nouns to improve the grouping results. Each group is ranked based on popularity and reliability factors. Current detection method is limited to facts part of messages. We developed an application called “Hotstream” based on the proposed method. Users can discover breaking news from the Twitter timeline. Each story is provided with the information of message originator, story development and activity chart. This provides a convenient way for people to follow breaking news and stay informed with real-time updates.

Breaking News Detection and Tracking in Twitter.

Twitter is among the fastest-growing microblogging and online social networking services. Messages posted on Twitter tweets have been reporting everything from daily life stories to the latest local and global news and events. Monitoring and analyzing this rich and continuous user-generated content can yield unprecedentedly valuable information, enabling users and organizations to acquire actionable knowledge. This article provides a survey of techniques for event detection from Twitter streams. These techniques aim at finding real-world occurrences that unfold over space and time. In contrast to conventional media, event detection from Twitter streams poses new challenges. Twitter streams contain large amounts of meaningless messages and polluted content, which negatively affect the detection performance. In addition, traditional text mining techniques are not suitable, because of the short length of tweets, the large number of spelling and grammatical errors, and the frequent use of informal and mixed language. Event detection techniques presented in literature address these issues by adapting techniques from various fields to the uniqueness of Twitter. This article classifies these techniques according to the event type, detection task, and detection method and discusses commonly used features. Finally, it highlights the need for public benchmarks to evaluate the performance of different detection approaches and various features.

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Farzindar Atefeh

Papers

A Survey of Techniques for Event Detection in Twitter