  Social networks enable users to freely communicate with each other and share
their recent news, ongoing activities or views about different topics. As a
result, they can be seen as a potentially viable source of information to
understand the current emerging topics/events. The ability to model emerging
topics is a substantial step to monitor and summarize the information
originating from social sources. Applying traditional methods for event
detection which are often proposed for processing large, formal and structured
documents, are less effective, due to the short length, noisiness and
informality of the social posts. Recent event detection techniques address
these challenges by exploiting the opportunities behind abundant information
available in social networks. This article provides an overview of the state of
the art in event detection from social networks.
