Residents often rely on newspapers and television to gather hyperlocal news for community awareness and engagement. More recently, social media have emerged as an increasingly important source of hyperlocal news. Thus far, the literature on using social media to create desirable societal benefits, such as civic awareness and engagement, is still in its infancy. One key challenge in this research stream is to timely and accurately distill information from noisy social media data streams to community members. In this work, we develop SHEDR (social media–based hyperlocal event detection and recommendation), an end-to-end neural event detection and recommendation framework with a particular use case for Twitter to facilitate residents’ information seeking of hyperlocal events. The key model innovation in SHEDR lies in the design of the hyperlocal event detector and the event recommender. First, we harness the power of two popular deep neural network models, the convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM), in a novel joint CNN-LSTM model to characterize spatiotemporal dependencies for capturing unusualness in a region of interest, which is classified as a hyperlocal event. Next, we develop a neural pairwise ranking algorithm for recommending detected hyperlocal events to residents based on their interests. To alleviate the sparsity issue and improve personalization, our algorithm incorporates several types of contextual information covering topic, social, and geographical proximities. We perform comprehensive evaluations based on two large-scale data sets comprising geotagged tweets covering Seattle and Chicago. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in comparison with several state-of-the-art approaches. We show that our hyperlocal event detection and recommendation models consistently and significantly outperform other approaches in terms of precision, recall, and F-1 scores. Summary of Contribution: In this paper, we focus on a novel and important, yet largely underexplored application of computing—how to improve civic engagement in local neighborhoods via local news sharing and consumption based on social media feeds. To address this question, we propose two new computational and data-driven methods: (1) a deep learning–based hyperlocal event detection algorithm that scans spatially and temporally to detect hyperlocal events from geotagged Twitter feeds; and (2) A personalized deep learning–based hyperlocal event recommender system that systematically integrates several contextual cues such as topical, geographical, and social proximity to recommend the detected hyperlocal events to potential users. We conduct a series of experiments to examine our proposed models. The outcomes demonstrate that our algorithms are significantly better than the state-of-the-art models and can provide users with more relevant information about the local neighborhoods that they live in, which in turn may boost their community engagement.
