Event Evolution Analysis in Microblogging Based on a View of Public Opinion Field

Event evolution analysis, which focus on discovering underlying relationships among events by using methods of data mining on text corpus, is a meaningful and challenge problem. In recent years, more and more people began to express their opinion on public events though microblogging services. It makes that the microblogging corpus contains not only the facts related to the events, but also the public concerns. Therefore, we believe that the event evolution analysis in microblogging should take different approaches and perspectives with the state-of-the-arts. In this paper, we employ the concept of public opinion field, on which event information and public opinion in text corpus are distinguished. Based on this view, we focus on how does the public opinion affect the evolution of events, propose a method to measure the influence, and represent it on the event evolution graph. The preliminary experiments on our dataset about H7N9 bird flu collected from Weibo shows that our method can get consistent results with our intuitive feel, that illustrates the effectiveness of the method.