EVENT IDENTIFICATION THROUGH ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL-MEDIA POSTINGS

摘要

In various embodiments, documents such as social-media postings are analyzed to identify volume bursts, and the bursts are analyzed to compute probability metrics associated with events or types of events. Various embodiments of the present invention pertain to techniques for analyzing a collection of electronically stored documents, such as social-media postings, to measure occurrences of a type of event based on contents of the documents. An exemplary application involves the prevalence, location, and substantive content of collective action events, which are protests, rallies, and any other movement or collection of people controlled by anyone other than the government and particularly in countries, such as China, with active censorship policies. Social media in China is large, pervasive, and growing fast, but it is all subject to the huge and well-developed Chinese censorship apparatus.