Identification of live news events using Twitter

Abstract

Twitter presents a source of information that cannot easily be obtained anywhere else. However, though many posts on Twitter reveal up-to-the-minute information about events in the world or interesting sentiments, far more posts are of no interest to the general audience. A method to determine which Twitter users are posting reliable information and which posts are interesting is presented. Using this information a search through a large, online news corpus is conducted to discover future events before they occur along with information about the location of the event. These events can be identified with a high degree of accuracy by verifying that an event found in one news article is found in other similar news articles, since any event interesting to a general audience will likely have more than one news story written about it. Twitter posts near the time of the event can then be identified as interesting if they match the event in terms of keywords or location. This method enables the discovery of interesting posts about current and future events and helps in the identification of reliable users.