Structured Event Retrieval over Microblog Archives
Donald Metzler, Congxing Cai, Eduard H. Hovy · 2012
Microblog streams often contain a consider-able amount of information about local, re-gional, national, and global events. Most ex-isting microblog search capabilities are fo-cused on recent happenings and do not provide the ability to search and explore past events. This paper proposes the problem of structured retrieval of historical event information over microblog archives. Rather than retrieving in-dividual microblog messages in response to an event query, we propose retrieving a ranked list of historical event summaries by distill-ing high quality event representations using a novel temporal query expansion technique. The results of an exploratory study carried out over a large archive of Twitter messages demonstrates both the value of the microblog event retrieval task and the effectiveness of our proposed search methodologies. 1