Ranking and tagging bursty features in text streams with context language models

• Published in: Frontiers of Computer Science Vol. 11; no. 5; pp. 852 - 862
• Main Authors: Xin ZHAO, Wayne, LIU, Chen, WEN, Ji-Rong, LI, Xiaoming
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Beijing Higher Education Press 01.10.2017; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: bursty feature tagging; bursty features; bursty features ranking; Computer Science; Context; context modeling; Data mining; Language; Ranking; Research Article; Semantics; Streams; Tags; Time series; 上下文模型; 应用程序; 排序; 文本挖掘; 标记; 特征; 突发性; 语言模型; bursty features; context modeling; bursty features ranking; bursty feature tagging
• ISSN: 2095-2228; 2095-2236
• DOI: 10.1007/s11704-016-5144-z

Detecting and using bursty patterns to analyze text streams has been one of the fundamental approaches in many temporal text mining applications. So far, most existing studies have focused on developing methods to detect bursty features based purely on term frequency changes. Few have taken the semantic contexts of bursty features into consideration, and as a result the detected bursty features may not always be interesting and can be hard to interpret. In this article, we propose to model the contexts of bursty features using a language modeling approach. We propose two methods to estimate the context language models based on sentence-level context and document-level context.We then propose a novel topic diversity-based metric using the context models to find newsworthy bursty features. We also propose to use the context models to automatically assign meaningful tags to bursty features. Using a large corpus of news articles, we quantitatively show that the proposed context language models for bursty features can effectively help rank bursty features based on their newsworthiness and to assign meaningful tags to annotate bursty features. We also use two example text mining applications to qualitatively demonstrate the usefulness of bursty feature ranking and tagging.