Detecting Events in Online Social Networks: Definitions, Trends and Challenges

Event detection is a research area that attracted attention during the last years due to the widespread availability of social media data. The problem of event detection has been examined in multiple social media sources like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. The task comprises many challenges including the processing of large volumes of data and high levels of noise. In this article, we present a wide range of event detection algorithms, architectures and evaluation methodologies. In addition, we extensively discuss on available datasets, potential applications and open research issues. The main objective is to provide a compact representation of the recent developments in the field and aid the reader in understanding the main challenges tackled so far as well as identifying interesting future research directions.