Burst Detection in Social Media Streams for Tracking Interest Profiles in Real Time

Cody Buntain, Jimmy J. Lin

Abstract: This work presents RTTBurst, an end-to-end system for ingesting descriptions of user interest profiles and discovering new and relevant tweets based on those interest profiles using a simple model for identifying bursts in token usage. Our approach differs from standard retrieval-based techniques in that it primarily focuses on identifying noteworthy moments in the tweet stream, and ?summarizes? those moments using selected tweets. We lay out the architecture of RTTBurst, our participation in and performance at the TREC 2015 Microblog track, and a method for combining and potentially improving existing TREC systems. Official results and post hoc experiments show that our simple targeted burst detection technique is competitive with existing systems. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our burst detection mechanism can be used to improve the performance of other systems for the same task.