TweetStream2Story: Narrative Extraction from Tweets in Real Time

The rise of social media has brought a great transformation to the way news are discovered and shared. Unlike traditional news sources, social media allows anyone to cover a story. Therefore, sometimes an event is already discussed by people before a journalist turns it into a news article. Twitter is a particularly appealing social network for discussing events, since its posts are very compact and, therefore, contain colloquial language and abbreviations. However, its large volume of tweets also makes it impossible for a user to keep up with an event. In this work, we present TweetStream2Story, a web app for extracting narratives from tweets posted in real time, about a topic of choice. This framework can be used to provide new information to journalists or be of interest to any user who wishes to stay up-to-date on a certain topic or ongoing event. As a contribution to the research community, we provide a live version of the demo, as well as its source code.