Processing Social Media in Real-Time

Damiano Spina, Arkaitz Zubiaga, Amit P. Sheth, Markus Strohmaier

Information Processing and Management. 2019.

Social media provide a wealth of information that reveals insights into current affairs and ongoing events (Becker, Iter, Naaman, Gravano, 2012, Kwak, Lee, Park, Moon, 2010). A careful exploitation of this information can be of help to enrich numerous applications with fresh insights. Example applications include news reporting (Diakopoulos, De Choudhury, Naaman, 2012, Zubiaga, Ji, Knight, 2013), disaster coordination (Imran, Castillo, Diaz, & Vieweg, 2015), law enforcement (Brunty & Helenek, 2014), health emergencies such as infectious disease outbreaks (Schmidt, 2012), and prediction of election or referendum outcomes (Franch, 2013). In situations like these, where access to timely information is key, an ability to process social media in a real-time fashion becomes an important requirement (Sheth, Jadhav, Kapanipathi, Lu, Purohit, Smith, Wang, 2014, Zubiaga, Spina, Martinez, Fresno, 2015). This presents new challenging issues for the research community in order to quickly make sense of torrential social streams as they come out, and to make the most from the fresh knowledge available from these streams. This special issue brings together contributions that report on novel techniques and applications that make the most of the information gathered from social media in a (near) real-time fashion.

@misc{spina2019processing,
  title={Processing social media in real-time},
  author={Spina, Damiano and Zubiaga, Arkaitz and Sheth, Amit and Strohmaier, Markus},
  journal={Information Processing \& Management},
  volume={56},
  number={3},
  pages={1081--1083},
  year={2019},
  publisher={Elsevier}
}