Catching Events in the Twitter Stream: A Showcase of Student Projects

A group of bachelor students in information science at the University of Groningen applied off-the-shelf tools to the detection of events on Twitter, focusing on Dutch. Systems were built in four socially relevant areas: sports, emergencies, local life, and news. We show that (i) real time event detection is a feasible and suitable way for students to learn and employ data mining and analysis techniques, while building end-to-end potentially useful applications; and (ii) even just using off-the-shelf resources for such applications can yield very