Social networks are widely used for information consumption and dissemination, especially during time-critical events such as natural disasters. Despite its significantly large volume, social media content is often too noisy for direct use in any application. Therefore, it is important to filter, categorize, and concisely summarize the available content to facilitate effective consumption and decision-making. To address such issues automatic classification systems have been developed using supervised modeling approaches, thanks to the earlier efforts on creating labeled datasets. However, existing datasets are limited in different aspects (e.g., size, contains duplicates) and less suitable to support more advanced and data-hungry deep learning models. In this paper, we present a new large-scale dataset with ~77K human-labeled tweets, sampled from a pool of ~24 million tweets across 19 disaster events that happened between 2016 and 2019. Moreover, we propose a data collection and sampling pipeline, which is important for social media data sampling for human annotation. We report multiclass classification results using classic and deep learning (fastText and transformer) based models to set the ground for future studies. The dataset and associated resources are publicly available. https://crisisnlp.qcri.org/humaid_dataset.html
University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Kansas State University（堪萨斯州立大学）
Tweet hashtags have the potential to improve the search for information during disaster events. However, there is a large number of disaster-related tweets that do not have any user-provided hashtags. Moreover, only a small number of tweets that contain actionable hashtags are useful for disaster response. To facilitate progress on automatic identification (or extraction) of disaster hashtags for Twitter data, we construct a unique dataset of disaster-related tweets annotated with hashtags useful for filtering actionable information. Using this dataset, we further investigate Long Short Term M…
Social media is often utilized as a lifeline for communication during natural disasters. Traditionally, natural disaster tweets are filtered from the Twitter stream using the name of the natural disaster and the filtered tweets are sent for human annotation. The process of human annotation to create labeled sets for machine learning models is laborious, time consuming, at times inaccurate, and more importantly not scalable in terms of size and real-time use. In this work, we curate a silver standard dataset using weak supervision. In order to validate its utility, we train machine learning mod…
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
Natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes) affect millions of people each year, causing widespread destruction in their wake. People have recently taken to social media websites (e.g., Twitter) to share their sentiments and feelings with the larger community. Consequently, these platforms have become instrumental in understanding and perceiving emotions at scale. In this paper, we introduce HurricaneEmo, an emotion dataset of 15,000 English tweets spanning three hurricanes: Harvey, Irma, and Maria. We present a comprehensive study of fine-grained emotions and propose classification tasks to discrimi…
Qatar Computing Research Institute (HBKU)（卡塔尔计算研究所（哈马德·本·哈利法大学））；Eurecat（欧洲加泰罗尼亚研究中心）
Microblogging platforms such as Twitter provide active communication channels during mass convergence and emergency events such as earthquakes, typhoons. During the sudden onset of a crisis situation, affected people post useful information on Twitter that can be used for situational awareness and other humanitarian disaster response efforts, if processed timely and effectively. Processing social media information pose multiple challenges such as parsing noisy, brief and informal messages, learning information categories from the incoming stream of messages and classifying them into different …
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所（哈马德·本·哈利法大学））；School of Computer Science and Engineering, NTU（新加坡南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
During time-critical situations such as natural disasters, rapid classification of data posted on social networks by affected people is useful for humanitarian organizations to gain situational awareness and to plan response efforts. However, the scarcity of labeled data in the early hours of a crisis hinders machine learning tasks thus delays crisis response. In this work, we propose to use an inductive semi-supervised technique to utilize unlabeled data, which is often abundant at the onset of a crisis event, along with fewer labeled data. Specif- ically, we adopt a graph-based deep learning…
Social media like Twitter provide a common platform to share and communicate personal experiences with other people. People often post their life experiences, local news, and events on social media to inform others. Many rescue agencies monitor this type of data regularly to identify disasters and reduce the risk of lives. However, it is impossible for humans to manually check the mass amount of data and identify disasters in real-time. For this purpose, many research works have been proposed to present words in machine-understandable representations and apply machine learning methods on the w…
Department of Computer Systems Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan.（巴基斯坦白沙瓦工程与技术大学计算机系统工程系）；Department of Computer Science, Munsters Technological University, Cork, Ireland.（爱尔兰科克芒斯特理工大学计算机科学系）
In recent years, social media has been widely explored as a potential source of communication and information in disasters and emergency situations. Several interesting works and case studies of disaster analytics exploring different aspects of natural disasters have been already conducted. Along with the great potential, disaster analytics comes with several challenges mainly due to the nature of social media content. In this paper, we explore one such challenge and propose a text classification framework to deal with Twitter noisy data. More specifically, we employed several transformers bot…
Kansas State University（堪萨斯州立大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
While keyphrase extraction has received considerable attention in recent years, relatively few studies exist on extracting keyphrases from social media platforms such as Twitter, and even fewer for extracting disaster-related keyphrases from such sources. During a disaster, keyphrases can be extremely useful for filtering relevant tweets that can enhance situational awareness. Previously, joint training of two different layers of a stacked Recurrent Neural Network for keyword discovery and keyphrase extraction had been shown to be effective in extracting keyphrases from general Twitter data. W…
Kyung Hee University（庆熙大学）；National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST)（国立科技大学（NUST））；Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI)（卡塔尔计算研究所（QCRI））
Catastrophic events create uncertain situations for humanitarian organizations locating and providing aid to affected people. Many people turn to social media during disasters for requesting help and/or providing relief to others. However, the majority of social media posts seeking help could not properly be detected and remained concealed because often they are noisy and ill-formed. Existing systems lack in planning an effective strategy for tweet preprocessing and grasping the contexts of tweets. This research, first of all, formally defines request tweets in the context of social networking…
Investigating disaster response through social media data and the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model: A case study of 2020 Western U.S. wildfire season
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU（哈马德·本·哈利法大学卡塔尔计算研究所）
During natural or man-made disasters, humanitarian response organizations look for useful information to support their decision-making processes. Social media platforms such as Twitter have been considered as a vital source of useful information for disaster response and management. Despite advances in natural language processing techniques, processing short and informal Twitter messages is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose to use Deep Neural Network (DNN) to address two types of information needs of response organizations: 1) identifying informative tweets and 2) classifying them …
The first objective towards the effective use of microblogging services such as Twitter for situational awareness during the emerging disasters is discovery of the disaster-related postings. Given the wide range of possible disasters, using a pre-selected set of disaster-related keywords for the discovery is suboptimal. An alternative that we focus on in this work is to train a classifier using a small set of labeled postings that are becoming available as a disaster is emerging. Our hypothesis is that utilizing large quantities of historical microblogs could improve the quality of classificat…
Türkiye is located on a fault line; earthquakes often occur on a large and small scale. There is a need for effective solutions for gathering current information during disasters. We can use social media to get insight into public opinion. This insight can be used in public relations and disaster management. In this study, Twitter posts on Izmir Earthquake that took place on October 2020 are analyzed. We question if this analysis can be used to make social inferences on time. Data mining and natural language processing (NLP) methods are used for this analysis. NLP is used for sentiment analysi…
International School Vietnam National University, Hanoi（河内越南国家大学国际学院）
Social networking services have became an important communication channel in time of emergency. The aim of this study is to create a machine learning language model that is able to investigate if a person or area was in danger or not. The ubiquitousness of smartphones enables people to announce an emergency they are observing in real-time. Because of this, more agencies are interested in programmatically monitoring Twitter (i.e. disaster relief organizations and news agencies). Design a language model that is able to understand and acknowledge when a disaster is happening based on the social n…
Social media has played a huge part on how people get informed and communicate with one another. It has helped people express their needs due to distress especially during disasters. Because posts made through it are publicly accessible by default, Twitter is among the most helpful social media sites in times of disaster. With this, the study aims to assess the needs expressed during calamities by Filipinos on Twitter. Data were gathered and classified as either disaster-related or unrelated with the use of Naïve Bayes classifier. After this, the disaster-related tweets were clustered per disa…
While it is well-documented that climate change accepters and deniers have become increasingly polarized in the United States over time, there has been no large-scale examination of whether these individuals are prone to changing their opinions as a result of natural external occurrences. On the sub-population of Twitter users, we examine whether climate change sentiment changes in response to five separate natural disasters occurring in the U.S. in 2018. We begin by showing that relevant tweets can be classified with over 75% accuracy as either accepting or denying climate change when using o…
Social media has become an essential channel for posting disaster-related information, which provide governments and relief agencies real-time data for better disaster management. However, research in this field has not received sufficient attention and extracting useful information is still challenging. This paper aims to improve disaster relief efficiency via mining and analyzing social media data like public attitudes towards disaster response and public demands for targeted relief supplies during different types of disasters. We focus on different natural disasters based on properties such…
The importance of social media is again exposed in the recent tragedy of the 2023 Turkey and Syria earthquake. Many victims who were trapped under the rubble called for help by posting messages in Twitter. We present an interactive tool to provide situational awareness for missing and trapped people, and disaster relief for rescue and donation efforts. The system (i) collects tweets, (ii) classifies the ones calling for help, (iii) extracts important entity tags, and (iv) visualizes them in an interactive map screen. Our initial experiments show that the performance in terms of the F1 score is…
Indian Institute of Information Technology Raichur（印度信息技术学院赖布尔分校）；National Institute of Technology, Rourkela（鲁尔克拉国家理工学院）；Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences（奥地利科学院空间研究所）；Nikhef（荷兰国家亚原子物理研究所）
University of Houston（休斯顿大学）；University of Tehran（德黑兰大学）；Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM)（基础科学研究所（IPM））
In a disaster situation, first responders need to quickly acquire situational awareness and prioritize response based on the need, resources available and impact. Can they do this based on digital media such as Twitter alone, or newswire alone, or some combination of the two? We examine this question in the context of the 2015 Nepal Earthquakes. Because newswire articles are longer, effective summaries can be helpful in saving time yet giving key content. We evaluate the effectiveness of several unsupervised summarization techniques in capturing key content. We propose a method to link tweets …
Social media such as Facebook and Twitter have proven to be a useful resource to understand public opinion towards real world events. In this paper, we investigate over 1.5 million Twitter messages (tweets) for the period 9th March 2011 to 31st May 2011 in order to track awareness and anxiety levels in the Tokyo metropolitan district to the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and subsequent tsunami and nuclear emergencies. These three events were tracked using both English and Japanese tweets. Preliminary results indicated: 1) close correspondence between Twitter data and earthquake events, 2) strong corre…
A Named Entity Recognition and Topic Modeling-based Solution for Locating and Better Assessment of Natural Disasters in Social Media
University of Engineering and Technology（工程技术大学）；Abbasyn University（阿巴西恩大学）；University of Western Australia（西澳大学）；Munster Technological University Cork（芒斯特理工大学科克分校）
People increasingly use social media to report emergencies, seek help or share information during disasters, which makes social networks an important tool for disaster management. To meet these time-critical needs, we present a weakly supervised approach for rapidly building high-quality classifiers that label each individual Twitter message with fine-grained event categories. Most importantly, we propose a novel method to create high-quality labeled data in a timely manner that automatically clusters tweets containing an event keyword and asks a domain expert to disambiguate event word senses…
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur（印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校）
Twitter has acted as an important source of information during disasters and pandemic, especially during the times of COVID-19. In this paper, we describe our system entry for WNUT 2020 Shared Task-3. The task was aimed at automating the extraction of a variety of COVID-19 related events from Twitter, such as individuals who recently contracted the virus, someone with symptoms who were denied testing and believed remedies against the infection. The system consists of separate multi-task models for slot-filling subtasks and sentence-classification subtasks while leveraging the useful sentence-l…
INFOTEC Centro de Investigación e Innovación en Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicación（INFOTEC 信息与通信技术创新研究中心）；CentroGEO Centro de Investigación en Ciencias de Información Geoespacial（CentroGEO 地球空间信息科学研究中心）；CONACyT Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología（CONACyT 国家科学技术委员会）；Colgate University（科尔盖特大学）
Twitter is perhaps the social media more amenable for research. It requires only a few steps to obtain information, and there are plenty of libraries that can help in this regard. Nonetheless, knowing whether a particular event is expressed on Twitter is a challenging task that requires a considerable collection of tweets. This proposal aims to facilitate, to a researcher interested, the process of mining events on Twitter by opening a collection of processed information taken from Twitter since December 2015. The events could be related to natural disasters, health issues, and people's mobili…
Qatar Computing Research Institute – HBKU（卡塔尔计算研究所 – 哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
The role of social media, in particular microblogging platforms such as Twitter, as a conduit for actionable and tactical information during disasters is increasingly acknowledged. However, time-critical analysis of big crisis data on social media streams brings challenges to machine learning techniques, especially the ones that use supervised learning. The Scarcity of labeled data, particularly in the early hours of a crisis, delays the machine learning process. The current state-of-the-art classification methods require a significant amount of labeled data specific to a particular event for …
Twitter and, in general, social media has become an indispensable communication channel in times of emergency. The ubiquitousness of smartphone gadgets enables people to declare an emergency observed in real-time. As a result, more agencies are interested in programmatically monitoring Twitter (disaster relief organizations and news agencies). Therefore, recognizing the informativeness of a Tweet can help filter noise from the large volumes of Tweets. In this paper, we present our submission for WNUT-2020 Task 2: Identification of informative COVID-19 English Tweets. Our most successful model …
Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP Lab)（普适知识处理实验室（UKP实验室））；Hessian Center for AI (hessian.AI)（黑森人工智能中心（hessian.AI））；Technical University Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Language use changes over time, and this impacts the effectiveness of NLP systems. This phenomenon is even more prevalent in social media data during crisis events where meaning and frequency of word usage may change over the course of days. Contextual language models fail to adapt temporally, emphasizing the need for temporal adaptation in models which need to be deployed over an extended period of time. While existing approaches consider data spanning large periods of time (from years to decades), shorter time spans are critical for crisis data. We quantify temporal degradation for this scen…
Public conversations on Twitter comprise many pertinent topics including disasters, protests, politics, propaganda, sports, climate change, epidemics/pandemic outbreaks, etc., that can have both regional and global aspects. Spatial discourse analysis rely on geographical data. However, today less than 1% of tweets are geotagged; in both cases--point location or bounding place information. A major issue with tweets is that Twitter users can be at location A and exchange conversations specific to location B, which we call the Location A/B problem. The problem is considered solved if location ent…
Texas Tech University（德克萨斯理工大学）；Kinetica db Inc.（Kinetica db 公司）
Social networks can serve as a valuable communication channel for calls for help, offering assistance, and coordinating rescue activities in disaster. Social networks such as Twitter allow users to continuously update relevant information, which is especially useful during a crisis, where the rapidly changing conditions make it crucial to be able to access accurate information promptly. Social media helps those directly affected to inform others of conditions on the ground in real time and thus enables rescue workers to coordinate their efforts more effectively, better meeting the survivors' n…
Relevant and timely information collected from social media during crises can be an invaluable resource for emergency management. However, extracting this information remains a challenging task, particularly when dealing with social media postings in multiple languages. This work proposes a cross-lingual method for retrieving and summarizing crisis-relevant information from social media postings. We describe a uniform way of expressing various information needs through structured queries and a way of creating summaries answering those information needs. The method is based on multilingual tran…
Social media such as Twitter provide valuable information to crisis managers and affected people during natural disasters. Machine learning can help structure and extract information from the large volume of messages shared during a crisis; however, the constantly evolving nature of crises makes effective domain adaptation essential. Supervised classification is limited by unchangeable class labels that may not be relevant to new events, and unsupervised topic modelling by insufficient prior knowledge. In this paper, we bridge the gap between the two and show that BERT embeddings finetuned on …
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）
The outbreak of the novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has lasted for nearly two years and caused unprecedented impacts on people's daily life around the world. Even worse, the emergence of the COVID-19 Delta variant once again puts the world in danger. Fortunately, many countries and companies have started to develop coronavirus vaccines since the beginning of this disaster. Till now, more than 20 vaccines have been approved by the World Health Organization (WHO), bringing light to people besieged by the pandemic. The promotion of COVID-19 vaccination around the world also brings a lot…
This paper attempt to study the effectiveness of text representation schemes on two tasks namely: User Aggression and Fact Detection from the social media contents. In User Aggression detection, The aim is to identify the level of aggression from the contents generated in the Social media and written in the English, Devanagari Hindi and Romanized Hindi. Aggression levels are categorized into three predefined classes namely: `Non-aggressive`, `Overtly Aggressive`, and `Covertly Aggressive`. During the disaster-related incident, Social media like, Twitter is flooded with millions of posts. In su…
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati（印度理工学院古瓦哈提分校）
Social scientists and psychologists take interest in understanding how people express emotions and sentiments when dealing with catastrophic events such as natural disasters, political unrest, and terrorism. The COVID-19 pandemic is a catastrophic event that has raised a number of psychological issues such as depression given abrupt social changes and lack of employment. Advancements of deep learning-based language models have been promising for sentiment analysis with data from social networks such as Twitter. Given the situation with COVID-19 pandemic, different countries had different peaks…
