Modeling Fuzzy Cluster Transitions for Topic Tracing

Twitter can be viewed as a data source for Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The continuously updating data streams on Twitter make it challenging to trace real-time topic evolution. In this paper, we propose a framework for modeling fuzzy transitions of topic clusters. We extend our previous work on crisp cluster transitions by incorporating fuzzy logic in order to enrich the underlying structures identified by the framework. We apply the methodology to both computer generated clusters of nouns from tweets and human tweet annotations. The obtained fuzzy transitions are compared with the crisp transitions, on both computer generated clusters and human labeled topic sets.