Towards a Social Media Analytics Platform: Event Detection and User Profiling for Twitter - A Tutorial at WWW 2014-

Microblog data differs significantly from the traditional text data with respect to a variety of dimensions. Microblog data contains short documents, SMS kind of language, and is full of code mixing. Though a lot of it is mere social babble, it also contains fresh news coming from human sensors at a humungous rate. Given such interesting characteristics, the world wide web community has witnessed a large number of research tasks for microblogging platforms recently. Event detection on Twitter is one of the most popular such tasks with a large number of applications. The proposed tutorial on social analytics for Twitter will contain three parts. In the first part, we will discuss research efforts towards detection of events from Twitter using both the tweet content as well as other external sources. We will also discuss various applications for which event detection mechanisms have been put to use. Merely detecting events is not enough. Applications require that the detector must be able to provide a good description of the event as well. In the second part, we will focus on describing events using the best phrase, event type, event timespan, and credibility. In the third part, we will discuss user profiling for Twitter with a special focus on user location prediction. We will conclude with a summary and thoughts on future directions.