A Novel Approach for Event Detection by Mining Spatio-temporal Information on Microblogs

Social networks have been regarded as a timely and cost-effective source of spatio-temporal information for many fields of application. However, while some research groups have successfully developed topic detection methods from the text streams for a while, and even some popular microblogging services such as Twitter did provide information of top trending topics for selection, it is still unable to fully support users pickup all of the real-time event topics with a comprehensive spatio-temporal viewpoint to satisfy their information needs. This paper aims to enhance the understanding on how social networks can be used as a reliable source of spatio-temporal information, by analyzing the temporal and spatial dynamics of Twitter activity. In this work, we developed several algorithms for mining microblogging text stream to obtain real-time and geospatial event information. The goal of our approach is to effectively detecting and grouping emerging topics by making use of real-time messages and geolocation data provided by social network services.