Real-time event detection based on geo extraction and temporal analysis

Microblogging is an important source of information about what is happening in the real world. In this work, we propose a novel approach for realtime event detection targeting accident and disaster events (ADEs) using microblogs from Sina Weibo. Our aim is to detect out every microblog which reports a real-world occurrence of a target event from the microblog stream. We formulate the event detection problem as a classification problem using microblog-based features, linguistic features, content features, and event features. We propose a street-level location extraction method based on the textual content to cooperate geo-information extraction. In order to deliver fresh events, we use a temporal analysis method to filter away past events. We compare our method with two state-of-the-art baselines on event detection, and achieve improvements in both precision and recall. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.