TopicSketch: Real-time Bursty Topic Detection from Twitter

Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

8-2016

Abstract

Twitter has become one of the largest microblogging platforms for users around the world to share anything happening around them with friends and beyond. A bursty topic in Twitter is one that triggers a surge of relevant tweets within a short period of time, which often reflects important events of mass interest. How to leverage Twitter for early detection of bursty topics has therefore become an important research problem with immense practical value. Despite the wealth of research work on topic modelling and analysis in Twitter, it remains a challenge to detect bursty topics in real-time. As existing methods can hardly scale to handle the task with the tweet stream in real-time, we propose in this paper TopicSketch, a sketch-based topic model together with a set of techniques to achieve real-time detection. We evaluate our solution on a tweet stream with over 30 million tweets. Our experiment results show both efficiency and effectiveness of our approach. Especially it is also demonstrated that TopicSketch on a single machine can potentially handle hundreds of millions tweets per day, which is on the same scale of the total number of daily tweets in Twitter, and present bursty events in finer-granularity.

Keywords

Realtime, TopicSketch, Tweet stream, bursty topic, Twitter, Real-time systems

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing | Social Media

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering

Volume

28

Issue

8

First Page

2216

Last Page

2229

ISSN

1041-4347

Identifier

10.1109/TKDE.2016.2556661

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2016.2556661

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