Topy: Real-Time Story Tracking via Social Tags

The Topy system automates real-time story tracking by utilizing crowdsourced tagging on social media platforms. Topy employs a state-of-the-art Twitter hashtag recommender to continuously annotate news articles with hashtags, a rich meta-data source that allows connecting articles under drastically different timelines than typical keyword based story tracking systems. Employing social tags for story tracking has the following advantages: (1) social annotation of news enables the detection of emerging concepts and topic drift in a story; (2) hashtags go beyond topics by grouping articles based on connected themes (e.g., #rip, #blacklivesmatter, #icantbreath); (3) hashtags link articles that focus on subplots of the same story (e.g., #palmyra, #isis, #refugeecrisis).