A Deep Multi-View Learning Framework for City Event Extraction from Twitter Data Streams

Abstract

Cities have been a thriving place for citizens over the centuries due to their complex infrastructure. The emergence of the Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSS) and context-aware technologies boost a growing interest in analysing, extracting and eventually understanding city events which subsequently can be utilised to leverage the citizen observations of their cities. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using Twitter textual streams for extracting city events. We propose a hierarchical multi-view deep learning approach to contextualise citizen observations of various city systems and services. Our goal has been to build a flexible architecture that can learn representations useful for tasks, thus avoiding excessive task-specific feature engineering. We apply our approach on a real-world dataset consisting of event reports and tweets of over four months from San Francisco Bay Area dataset and additional datasets collected from London. The results of our evaluations show that our proposed solution outperforms the existing models and can be used for extracting city related events with an averaged accuracy of 81% over all classes. To further evaluate the impact of our Twitter event extraction model, we have used two sources of authorised reports through collecting road traffic disruptions data from Transport for London API, and parsing the Time Out London website for sociocultural events. The analysis showed that 49.5% of the Twitter traffic comments are reported approximately five hours prior to the authorities official records. Moreover, we discovered that amongst the scheduled sociocultural event topics; tweets reporting transportation, cultural and social events are 31.75% more likely to influence the distribution of the Twitter comments than sport, weather and crime topics.