AAAI: Spatial and Temporal Reasoning
On Sunday, I attended the workshop on spatial and temporal reasoning. My intuition is that social media analysis requires technologies from this field of research both at the object and meta data levels. At the object level, much of our attention is give to discussing and reporting events in the real world. At the meta level, social media is about the relationships between individuals.
One of the most interesting challenges in social media analysis (for me) is figuring out not just what people are talking about, but where those people are. Is the iPhone getting more anticipatory buzz in Germany or France? A good number of individuals provide explicit information about their location in the profile. But often this information is missing or incomplete. However, we can fill in this information by discovering evidence in the content the individual provides and, importantly, by reasoning about these various pieces of evidence.
