Extracting emerging events from social media: X/Twitter and the multilingual analysis of emerging geopolitical topics in near real time

This study uses multiple languages to investigate the emergence of geopolitical topics on X / Twitter across two different time intervals: daily and hourly. For the daily interval, we examined the emergence of topics from February 4th, 2023, to March 23rd, 2023, at random three-hour intervals, compiling the topic modeling results for each day into a time series. For the hourly interval, we considered two days of data, June 1st, 2023, and June 6th, 2023, where we tracked the growth of topics for those days. We collected our data through the X / Twitter Filtered Stream using key bigrams (two-word phrases) for various geopolitical topics for multiple languages to identify emerging geopolitical events at the global and regional levels. Lastly, we compared the trends created by tracking emerging topics over time to Google Trends data, another data source for emerging topics. At the daily level, we found that our X / Twitter-based algorithm was able to identify multiple geopolitical events at least a day before they became relevant on Google Trends, and in the case of North Korean missile launches during this period, several languages identified more missile launches than the Google Trends data. As for the hourly data, we again found several topics that emerged hours before they started appearing on Google Trends. Our analyses also found that the different languages allowed for greater diversity in topics that would not have been possible if only one language had been used.