SMAFED: Real-Time Event Detection in Social Media Streams

Abstract

Interactions via social media platforms have made it possible for anyone, irrespective of physical location, to gain access to quick information on events taking place all over the globe. However, the semantic processing of social media data is complicated due to challenges such as language complexity, unstructured data, and ambiguity. In this paper, we proposed the Social Media Analysis Framework for Event Detection (SMAFED). SMAFED aims to facilitate improved semantic analysis of noisy terms in social media streams, improved representation/embedding of social media stream content, and improved summarisation of event clusters in social media streams. For this, we employed key concepts such as integrated knowledge base, resolving ambiguity, semantic representation of social media streams, and Semantic Histogram-based Incremental Clustering based on semantic relatedness. Two evaluation experiments were conducted to validate the approach. First, we evaluated the impact of the data enrichment layer of SMAFED. We found that SMAFED outperformed other pre-processing frameworks with a lower loss function of 0.15 on the first dataset and 0.05 on the second dataset. Secondly, we determined the accuracy of SMAFED at detecting events from social media streams. The result of this second experiment showed that SMAFED outperformed existing event detection approaches with better Precision (0.922), Recall (0.793), and F-Measure (0.853) metric scores. The findings of the study present SMAFED as a more efficient approach to event detection in social media.