Time Aware Knowledge Extraction for microblog summarization on Twitter

•Topic-based microblog summarization framework applied on Twitter considering both time and meaning of tweets.•Definition of Time Aware Knowledge Extraction methodology relying on temporal extension of Fuzzy Formal Concept Analysis.•Tweets’ content annotated via wikification service that enables to represent a sentence with a set of Wikipedia concepts.•Summaries are extracted with different level of detail exploiting the peculiar properties of timed fuzzy lattice.•The framework outperforms compared approaches based ensuring good tradeoff between quality, completeness and redundancy.

Microblogging services like Twitter and Facebook collect millions of user generated content every moment about trending news, occurring events, and so on. Nevertheless, it is really a nightmare to find information of interest through the huge amount of available posts that are often noisy and redundant. In the era of Big Data, social media analytics services have caught increasing attention from both research and industry. Specifically, the dynamic context of microblogging requires to manage not only meaning of information but also the evolution of knowledge over the timeline. This work defines Time Aware Knowledge Extraction (briefly TAKE) methodology that relies on temporal extension of Fuzzy Formal Concept Analysis. In particular, a microblog summarization algorithm has been defined filtering the concepts organized by TAKE in a time-dependent hierarchy. The algorithm addresses topic-based summarization on Twitter. Besides considering the timing of the concepts, another distinguishing feature of the proposed microblog summarization framework is the possibility to have more or less detailed summary, according to the user’s needs, with good levels of quality and completeness as highlighted in the experimental results.