Extraction and Compilation of Events and Sub-events from Twitter

Twitter has emerged as a great source to provide insights about upcoming planned and unplanned events of social, economic and political relevance. Big events are publicized and known in advance, but smaller, unplanned sub-events around them are not always advertised. These unplanned events may have a large localized impact. If known in advance, knowledge about events like threats, protests, demonstrations etc. or even about large flash mobs can be utilized by planners and event managers. Given the large volumes of tweets floating around at any given time, identifying relevant sub-events is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we explore machine learning techniques to identify, extract and build a map of small sub-events around a big, popular event. We use CRFs to extract event components from tweets. Events are resolved for uniqueness and compiled into a complete calendar. The model is evaluated on tweets around Olympic Games. The framework is generic enough to be adapted to other domains.