Context over Time: Modeling Context Evolution in Social Media

The rise of online social media has led to an explosion in user-generated content. However, user-generated content is difficult to analyze in isolation from its context. Accordingly, context detection and tracking its evolution is essential to understanding social media. This paper presents a statistical model that can detect interpretable topics along with their contexts. A topic is represented by a cluster of words that frequently occur together, and a context is represented by a cluster of hashtags that frequently occur with a topic. The model combines a context with a related topic by jointly modeling words with hashtags and time. Experiments on real datasets demonstrate that the proposed model successfully discovers both meaningful topics and contexts, and tracks their evolution.