State-of-the-art event encoding approaches rely on sentence or phrase level labeling, which are both time consuming and infeasible to extend to large scale text corpora and emerging domains. Using a multiple instance learning approach, we take advantage of the fact that while labels at the sentence level are difficult to obtain, they are relatively easy to gather at the document level. This enables us to view the problems of event detection and extraction in a unified manner. Using distributed representations of text, we develop a multiple instance formulation that simultaneously classifies news articles and extracts sentences indicative of events without any engineered features. We evaluate our model in its ability to detect news articles about civil unrest events (from Spanish text) across ten Latin American countries and identify the key sentences pertaining to these events. Our model, trained without annotated sentence labels, yields performance that is competitive with selected state-of-the-art models for event detection and sentence identification. Additionally, qualitative experimental results show that the extracted event-related sentences are informative and enhance various downstream applications such as article summarization, visualization, and event encoding.

Storyline detection aims to connect seemly irrelevant single documents into meaningful chains, which provides opportunities for understanding how events evolve over time and what triggers such evolutions. Most previous work generated the storylines through unsupervised methods that can hardly reveal underlying factors driving the evolution process. This paper introduces a Bayesian model to generate storylines from massive documents and infer the corresponding hidden relations and topics. In addition, our model is the first attempt that utilizes Twitter data as human input to ``supervise'' the generation of storylines. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate our proposed model can achieve significant improvement over baseline methods and can be used to discover interesting patterns for real world cases.

Infectious disease epidemics such as influenza and Ebola pose a serious threat to global public health. It is crucial to characterize the disease and the evolution of the ongoing epidemic efficiently and accurately. Computational epidemiology can model the disease progress and underlying contact network, but suffers from the lack of real-time and fine-grained surveillance data. Social media, on the other hand, provides timely and detailed disease surveillance, but is insensible to the underlying contact network and disease model. This paper proposes a novel semi-supervised deep learning framework that integrates the strengths of computational epidemiology and social media mining techniques. Specifically, this framework learns the social media users' health states and intervention actions in real time, which are regularized by the underlying disease model and contact network. Conversely, the learned knowledge from social media can be fed into computational epidemic model to improve the efficiency and accuracy of disease diffusion modeling. We propose an online optimization algorithm to substantialize the above interactive learning process iteratively to achieve a consistent stage of the integration. The extensive experimental results demonstrated that our approach can effectively characterize the spatio-temporal disease diffusion, outperforming competing methods by a substantial margin on multiple metrics.

We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of EMBERS, an automated, 24x7 continuous system for forecasting civil unrest across 10 countries of Latin America using open source indicators such as tweets, news sources, blogs, economic indicators, and other data sources. Unlike retrospective studies, EMBERS has been making forecasts into the future since Nov 2012 which have been (and continue to be) evaluated by an independent T&E team (MITRE). Of note, EMBERS has successfully forecast the June 2013 protests in Brazil and Feb 2014 violent protests in Venezuela. We outline the system architecture of EMBERS, individual models that leverage specific data sources, and a fusion and suppression engine that supports trading off specific evaluation criteria. EMBERS also provides an audit trail interface that enables the investigation of why specific predictions were made along with the data utilized for forecasting. Through numerous evaluations, we demonstrate the superiority of EMBERS over baserate methods and its capability to forecast significant societal happenings.

Financial markets are quite sensitive to unanticipated news and events. Identifying the effect of news on the market is a challenging task. In this demo, we present Forex-foreteller (FF) which mines news articles and makes forecasts about the movement of foreign currency markets. The system uses a combination of language models, topic clustering, and sentiment analysis to identify relevant news articles. These articles along with the historical stock index and currency exchange values are used in a linear regression model to make forecasts. The system has an interactive visualizer designed specifically for touch-sensitive devices which depicts forecasts along with the chronological news events and financial data used for making the forecasts.