Extracting Real-World Observations from Microblog
Since a large number of users of various social networking services post what they observe around themselves, what is going on around the world can be known in real time by extracting such real-world observations. Especially, observations covering miscellaneous areas of interest are posted to Twitter as short text messages. Our goal is to extract such observations to better understand the current situations of the real world. Since the observations at specific locations are often described with words representing the observed locations or events, the locations or events all over the world can be discovered by finding such local words which are uniquely used at specific locations or times. Then, parts of their observations can be obtained by using the local words to define the semantics of each local word. Finally, the observations which do not contain the local words but are related to the locations or events can be extracted based on their semantic relevancy to each local word.