Estimating the semantic type of events using location features from Flickr

Various methods for automatically detecting events from social media have been developed in recent years. However, little progress has been made towards extracting structured representations of such events, which severely limits the way in which the resulting event databases can be queried. As a first step to address this issue, we focus on the problem of discovering the semantic type of events. While current methods are almost exclusively based on bag-of-words methods, we show that additionally using location features can substantially improve the results. In particular, we use the tags associated with Flickr photos and the types of the known events near the venue of the event as context information.