A Syntax-based Learning Approach to Geo-locating Abnormal Traffic Events Using Social Sensing

Social sensing has emerged as a new sensing paradigm to observe the physical world by exploring the “wisdom of crowd” on social media. This paper focuses on the abnormal traffic event localization problem using social media sensing. Two critical challenges exist in the state-of-the-arts: i) “content-only inference”: the limited and unstructured content of a social media post provides little clue to accurately infer the locations of the reported traffic events; ii) “informal and scarce data”: the language of the social media post (e.g., tweet) is informal and the number of the posts that report the abnormal traffic events is often quite small. To address the above challenges, we develop SyntaxLoc, a syntax-based probabilistic learning framework to accurately identify the location entities by exploring the syntax of social media content. We perform extensive experiments to evaluate the SyntaxLoc framework through real world case studies in both New York City and Los Angeles. Evaluation results demonstrate significant performance gains of the SyntaxLoc framework over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of accurately identifying the location entities that can be directly used to locate the abnormal traffic events.