Predicting Crowd Behavior with Big Public Data

With public information becoming widely accessible and shared on today's web, greater insights are possible into crowd actions by citizens and non-state actors such as large protests and cyber activism. We present efforts to predict the occurrence, specific timeframe, and location of such actions before they occur based on public data collected from over 300,000 open content web sources in 7 languages, from all over the world, ranging from mainstream news to government publications to blogs and social media. Using natural language processing, event information is extracted from content such as type of event, what entities are involved and in what role, sentiment and tone, and the occurrence time range of the event discussed. Statements made on Twitter about a future date from the time of posting prove particularly indicative. We consider in particular the case of the 2013 Egyptian coup d'etat. The study validates and quantifies the common intuition that data on social media (beyond mainstream news sources) are able to predict major events.