KeySee: supporting keyword search on evolving events in social streams

Abstract

Online social streams such as Twitter/Facebook timelines and forum discussions have emerged as prevalent channels for information dissemination. As these social streams surge quickly, information overload has become a huge problem. Existing keyword search engines on social streams like Twitter Search are not successful in overcoming the problem, because they merely return an overwhelming list of posts, with little aggregation or semantics. In this demo, we provide a new solution called \keysee by grouping posts into events, and track the evolution patterns of events as new posts stream in and old posts fade out. Noise and redundancy problems are effectively addressed in our system. Our demo supports refined keyword query on evolving events by allowing users to specify the time span and designated evolution pattern. For each event result, we provide various analytic views such as frequency curves, word clouds and GPS distributions. We deploy \keysee on real Twitter streams and the results show that our demo outperforms existing keyword search engines on both quality and usability.