On The Spatiotemporal Burstiness of Terms

Abstract: Thousands of documents are made available to the users via the web on a daily basis. One of the most extensively studied problems in the context of such document streams is burst identification. Given a term t, a burst is generally exhibited when an unusually high frequency is observed for t. While spatial and temporal burstiness have been studied individually in the past, our work is the first to simultaneously track and measure spatiotemporal term burstiness. In addition, we use the mined burstiness information toward an efficient document-search engine: given a user's query of terms, our engine returns a ranked list of documents discussing influential events with a strong spatiotemporal impact. We demonstrate the efficiency of our methods with an extensive experimental evaluation on real and synthetic datasets.