Identifying content for planned events across social media sites

Abstract

User-contributed Web data contains rich and diverse information about a variety of events in the physical world, such as shows, festivals, conferences and more. This information ranges from known event features (e.g., title, time, location) posted on event aggregation platforms (e.g., Last.fm events, EventBrite, Facebook events) to discussions and reactions related to events shared on different social media sites (e.g., Twitter, YouTube, Flickr). In this paper, we focus on the challenge of automatically identifying user-contributed content for events that are planned and, therefore, known in advance, across different social media sites. We mine event aggregation platforms to extract event features, which are often noisy or missing. We use these features to develop query formulation strategies for retrieving content associated with an event on different social media sites. Further, we explore ways in which event content identified on one social media site can be used to retrieve additional relevant event content on other social media sites. We apply our strategies to a large set of user-contributed events, and analyze their effectiveness in retrieving relevant event content from Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr.