Efficient temporal mining of micro-blog texts and its application to event discovery

In this paper we present a novel method for clustering words in micro-blogs, based on the similarity of the related temporal series. Our technique, named SAX*, uses the Symbolic Aggregate ApproXimation algorithm to discretize the temporal series of terms into a small set of levels, leading to a string for each. We then define a subset of “interesting” strings, i.e. those representing patterns of collective attention. Sliding temporal windows are used to detect co-occurring clusters of tokens with the same or similar string. To assess the performance of the method we first tune the model parameters on a 2-month 1 % Twitter stream, during which a number of world-wide events of differing type and duration (sports, politics, disasters, health, and celebrities) occurred. Then, we evaluate the quality of all discovered events in a 1-year stream, “googling” with the most frequent cluster n-grams and manually assessing how many clusters correspond to published news in the same temporal slot. Finally, we perform a complexity evaluation and we compare SAX* with three alternative methods for event discovery. Our evaluation shows that SAX* is at least one order of magnitude less complex than other temporal and non-temporal approaches to micro-blog clustering. © 2015, The Author(s).