Event detection using Twitter: a spatio-temporal approach.

Background: Every day, around 400 million tweets are sent worldwide, which has become a rich source for detecting, monitoring and analysing news stories and special (disaster) events. Existing research within this field follows key words attributed to an event, monitoring temporal changes in word usage. However, this method requires prior knowledge of the event in order to know which words to follow, and does not guarantee that the words chosen will be the most appropriate to monitor.