Social media sites (e.g., Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook)
are a popular distribution outlet for users looking to share
their experiences and interests on the Web. These sites
host substantial amounts of user-contributed materials (e.g.,
photographs, videos, and textual content) for a wide va-
riety of real-world events of dierent type and scale.
By automatically identifying these events and their associated
user-contributed social media documents, which is the focus
of this paper, we can enable event browsing and search in
state-of-the-art search engines.