Multi-feature, multi-modal, and multi-source social event detection: A comprehensive survey

The tremendous growth of event dissemination over social networks makes it very challenging to accurately discover and track exciting events, as well as their evolution and scope over space and time. People have migrated to social platforms and messaging apps, which represent an opportunity to create a more accurate prediction of social developments by translating event related streams to meaningful insights. However, the huge spread of ‘noise’ from unverified social media sources makes it difficult to accurately detect and track events. Over the last decade, multiple surveys on event detection from social media have been presented, with the aim of highlighting the different NLP, data management and machine learning techniques used to discover specific types of events, such as social gatherings, natural disasters, and emergencies, among others. However, these surveys focus only on a few dimensions of event detection, such as emphasizing on knowledge discovery form single modality or single social media platform or applied only to one specific language. In this survey paper, we introduce multiple perspectives for event detection in the big social data era. This survey paper thoroughly investigates and summarizes the significant progress in social event detection and visualization techniques, by emphasizing crucial challenges ranging from the management, fusion, and mining of big social data, to the applicability of these methods to different platforms, multiple languages and dialects rather than a single language, and with multiple modalities. The survey also focuses on advanced features required for event extraction, such as spatial and temporal scopes, location inference from multi-modal data (i.e., text or image), and semantic analysis. Application-oriented challenges and opportunities are also discussed. Finally, quantitative and qualitative experimental procedures and results to illustrate the effectiveness and gaps in existing works are presented. • Classifying event detection with textual, spatial, temporal, and semantic features. • Defining event spatio-temporal evolution by considering incremental architectures. • Investigating fusion techniques from multiple data sources and multiple modalities. • Discussing various languages and dialects or language-independent mechanisms. • Presenting big data processing tools for scalable and efficient event detection.