Timelines as summaries of popular scheduled events
Omar Alonso, Kyle Shiells · 2013
Known events that are scheduled in advance, such as popular sports games, usually get a lot of attention from the public. Communications media like TV, radio, and newspapers will report the salient aspects of such events live or post-hoc for general consumption. However, certain actions, facts, and opinions would likely be omitted from those objective summaries. Our approach is to construct a particular game's timeline in such a way that it can be used as a quick summary of the main events that happened along with popular subjective and opinionated items that the public inject. Peaks in the volume of posts discussing the event reflect both objectively recognizable events in the game - in the sports example, a change in score - and subjective events such as a referee making a call fans disagree with. In this work, we introduce a novel timeline design that captures a more complete story of the event by placing the volume of Twitter posts alongside keywords that are driving the additional traffic. We demonstrate our approach using events of major international social impact from the World Cup 2010 and evaluate against professional liveblog coverage of the same events.