Post Summarization of Microblogs of Sporting Events

Every day 645 million Twitter users generate approximately 58 million tweets. This motivates the question if it is possible to generate a summary of events from this rich set of tweets only. Key challenges in post summarization from microblog posts include circumnavigating spam and conversational posts. In this study, we present a novel technique called lexi-temporal clustering (LTC), which identifies key events. LTC uses k-means clustering and we explore the use of various distance measures for clustering using Euclidean, cosine similarity and Manhattan distance. We collected three original data sets consisting of Twitter microblog posts covering sporting events, consisting of a cricket and two football matches. The match summaries generated by LTC were compared against standard summaries taken from sports sections of various news outlets, which yielded up to 81% precision, 58% recall and 62% F-measure on different data sets. In addition, we also report results of all three variants of the recall-oriented understudy for gisting evaluation (ROUGE) software, a tool which compares and scores automatically generated summaries against standard summaries.