Automatic Extraction of Soccer Game Events from Twitter
G. van Oorschot, Marieke van Erp, Chris Dijkshoorn · 2012
Abstract. Sports events data is often compiled manually by companies who rarely make it available for free to third parties. However, social media provide us with large amounts of data that discuss these very same matches for free. In this study, we investigate to what extent we can accurately extract sports data from tweets talking about soccer matches. We collected and analyzed tweets about 61 Dutch premier league soccer matches. For each of these matches we 1) extracted the minutes in which an event occurs, 2) classified the event type and 3) assigned events to either the home or away team. Our results show that the aggregation of tweets is a promising resource for extracting game summaries, but further research is needed to overcome data messiness and sparsity problems. 1