Exploiting Social Links for Event Identification in Social Media

We explore the use of social links (e.g., comment and author- ship connections) for identifying events and their associated documents (e.g., photos, videos) in social media sites. To un- derstand the potential benets of using social links for this task, we analyze a network of author comments associated with photographs in a large-scale Flickr data set. Our pre- liminary experiments, building on baselines that use social media document features without link information, suggest that social links can provide a useful indication of document similarity for event identication.