ELD : event timeline detection - a participant-based approach to tracking events

Abstract

People all over the world talk as events unfold, but what does it take for a machine to truly track an event? Event TimeLine Detection (ELD) is a real-time Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) solution to track events using Twitter with the hypothesis that it takes a deeper understanding of the event’s domain for a machine to describe its evolution. In ELD, understanding takes the form of identifying the participants that would eventually drive the event’s evolution. We propose Automatic Participant Detection (APD) as a way of identifying event participants, which ELD then tracks during the proceedings. TDT then mines the resulting Twitter stream, extracting developments and describing them as a timeline using a summarization algorithm.