Major Life Event Extraction from Twitter based on Congratulations/Condolences Speech Acts

Social media websites provide a platform for anyone to describe significant events taking place in their lives in realtime. Currently, the majority of personal news and life events are published in a textual format, motivating information extraction systems that can provide a structured representations of major life events (weddings, graduation, etc. . . ). This paper demonstrates the feasibility of accurately extracting major life events. Our system extracts a fine-grained description of users’ life events based on their published tweets. We are optimistic that our system can help Twitter users more easily grasp information from users they take interest in following and also facilitate many downstream applications, for example realtime friend recommendation.