A summarization tool for time-sensitive social media

Searching social content in general and microblogs (aka tweets) in particular has been basic and limited, especially for time-sensitive topics. The currently implemented microblog search on sites such as Twitter is based on simple word matching and retrieves the most recent microblogs that match a given query. Furthermore, a user may obtain hundreds or perhaps thousands of microblogs in response to a given query, leading to information overload. We present a new multidimensional microblog search tool that generates a comprehensive report from microblogs instead of a flat list of recent/relevant microblogs for a given query. Reports may include tag-clouds, topic time series, and most popular and funny microblogs, etc. The tool can be configured for monitoring time-sensitive topics using a set of predefined queries. We demonstrate our system on Arabic and English microblog collections. Additionally, we show a special configuration of the system for monitoring the 2012 Egyptian presidential elections.