Selecting representative and diverse spatio-textual posts over sliding windows

Abstract

Thousands of posts are generated constantly by millions of users in social media, with an increasing portion of this content being geotagged. Keeping track of the whole stream of this spatio-textual content can easily become overwhelming for the user. In this paper, we address the problem of selecting a small, representative and diversified subset of posts, which is continuously updated over a sliding window. Each such subset can be considered as a concise summary of the stream's contents within the respective time interval, being dynamically updated every time the window slides to reflect newly arrived and expired posts. We define the criteria for selecting the contents of each summary, and we present several alternative strategies for summary construction and maintenance that provide different trade-offs between information quality and performance. Furthermore, we optimize the performance of our methods by partitioning the newly arriving posts spatio-textually and computing bounds for the coverage and diversity of the posts in each partition. The proposed methods are evaluated experimentally using real-world datasets containing geotagged tweets and photos.