Online Social Networks Event Detection: A Survey

Today online social network services are challenging state-of-the-art social media mining algorithms and techniques due to its real-time nature, scale and amount of unstructured data generated. The continuous interactions between online social network participants generate streams of unbounded text content and evolutionary network structures within the social streams that make classical text mining and network analysis techniques obsolete and not suitable to deal with such new challenges. Performing event detection on online social networks is no exception, state-of-the-art algorithms rely on text mining techniques applied to pre-known datasets that are being processed with no restrictions on the computational complexity and required execution time per document analysis. Moreover, network analysis algorithms used to extract knowledge from users relations and interactions were not designed to handle evolutionary networks of such order of magnitude in terms of the number of nodes and edges. This specific problem of event detection becomes even more serious due to the real-time nature of online social networks. New or unforeseen events need to be identified and tracked on a real-time basis providing accurate results as quick as possible. It makes no sense to have an algorithm that provides detected event results a few hours after being announced by traditional newswire.