Eventgo: Constructing an Event Search Engine via Event Extraction from Social-Media Posts and Event Source Discovery(1/3)

One way to explore a city is to know what people do on their leisure. In fact, looking for local events and promotions is a common need for most people during travel or moving to a new city. However, delivering such messages to the right persons is still a challenge for small business that do not sell tickets on high-end websites. Instead, most events are usually distributed by posting on social networking sites like Facebook. To fulfill such information need, we consider information technologies to extract events from 230K Facebook fan pages to build an event database and provide a social event search service. The technologies includes web scrapping and web data extraction as well as natural language processing for event names and venues recognition. The project is expected to be completed in three years: In the first year, we will focus on the web crawling modules to continuously monitor event-registration websites, ticket-selling websites, social media (such as Facebook) for new event posts, and download posts for event announcement detection and event name recognition. The goal of the second year is to recognize event venue and locate the venue on the map. Because event venues can be an address, point of interest (POI), or a geopolitical entity (GPE), and multiple POIs or locations may be mentioned in a message, we also need to determine the correct POI and locate the position on the map to strengthen the event search service. To integrate events extracted from different data sources and for the purpose of event analysis, in the third year we plan to deduplicate events in the event database and conduct events classification such that we could better provide event statistics for urban and rural development planning from different perspective (such as time, space and event categories).