Text is all you need: LLM-enhanced incremental social event detection

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 expressions and abbreviations of short texts on social media platforms, which impact clustering accuracy. We propose a novel framework, LLM-enhanced Social Event Detection (LSED), which leverages the rich background knowledge of 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.