Text is All You Need: LLM-enhanced Incremental Social Event Detection

Zitai Qiu, Congbo Ma, Jia Wu, Jian Yang


Abstract
Social event detection (SED) is the task of identifying, categorizing, and tracking events from social data sources such as social media posts, news articles, and online discussions. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) SED models predominantly rely on graph neural networks (GNNs), which involve complex graph construction and time-consuming training processes, limiting their practicality in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we rethink the key challenge in SED: the informal and noisy nature of short texts on social media platforms, which impacts clustering accuracy. We propose a novel framework, LLM-enhanced Social Event Detection (LSED), which leverages the rich background knowledge of large language models (LLMs) to address this challenge. Specifically, LSED utilizes LLMs to formalize and disambiguate short texts by completing abbreviations and summarizing informal expressions. Furthermore, we introduce hyperbolic space embeddings, which are more suitable for natural language sentence representations, to enhance clustering performance. Extensive experiments on two challenging real-world datasets demonstrate that LSED outperforms existing SOTA models, achieving improvements in effectiveness, efficiency, and stability. Our work highlights the potential of LLMs in SED and provides a practical solution for real-world applications.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.233
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4666–4680
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.233/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zitai Qiu, Congbo Ma, Jia Wu, and Jian Yang. 2025. Text is All You Need: LLM-enhanced Incremental Social Event Detection. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4666–4680, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Text is All You Need: LLM-enhanced Incremental Social Event Detection (Qiu et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.233.pdf