Detection of Sentiment Provoking Events in Social Media

Social media has become one of the main sources of news and events due to its ability to disseminate and propagate information very fast and to a large population. Social media platforms are widely accessible to the population making it difficult to extract relevant information from the huge amount of posted data. In our study, we propose an algorithm that automatically detects events using strong sentiment classification and appropriate clustering techniques. We focus our study on a specific type of events that triggers strong sentiment among the public. Results show that the suggested methodology is able to identify important events, such as a mass shooting and plane crash, using a generalized and simple approach.