Xukun Li, & Doina Caragea. (2020). Improving Disaster-related Tweet Classification with a Multimodal Approach. In Amanda Hughes, Fiona McNeill, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2020 Conference Proceedings – 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 893–902). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: Social media data analysis is important for disaster management. Lots of prior studies have focused on classifying a tweet based on its text or based on its images, independently, even if the tweet contains both text and images. Under the assumptions that text and images may contain complementary information, it is of interest to construct classifiers that make use of both modalities of the tweet. Towards this goal, we propose a multimodal classification model which aggregates text and image information. Our study aims to provide insights into the benefits obtained by combining text and images, and to understand what type of modality is more informative with respect to disaster tweet classification. Experimental results show that both text and image classification can be improved by the multimodal approach.
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Valerio Lorini, Javier Rando, Diego Saez-Trumper, & Carlos Castillo. (2020). Uneven Coverage of Natural Disasters in Wikipedia: The Case of Floods. In Amanda Hughes, Fiona McNeill, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2020 Conference Proceedings – 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 688–703). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: The usage of non-authoritative data for disaster management provides timely information that might not be available through other means. Wikipedia, a collaboratively-produced encyclopedia, includes in-depth information about many natural disasters, and its editors are particularly good at adding information in real-time as a crisis unfolds. In this study, we focus on the most comprehensive version of Wikipedia, the English one. Wikipedia offers good coverage of disasters, particularly those having a large number of fatalities. However, by performing automatic content analysis at a global scale, we also show how the coverage of floods in Wikipedia is skewed towards rich, English-speaking countries, in particular the US and Canada. We also note how coverage of floods in countries with the lowest income is substantially lower than the coverage of floods in middle-income countries. These results have implications for analysts and systems using Wikipedia as an information source about disasters.
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Sandrine Bubendorff, & Caroline Rizza. (2020). The Wikipedia Contribution to Social Resilience During Terrorist Attacks. In Amanda Hughes, Fiona McNeill, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2020 Conference Proceedings – 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 790–801). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: This paper aims at studying the role of Wikipedia in social resilience processes during terrorist attacks. It discusses how Wikipedia users' specific skills are mobilized in order to make sense of the event as it unfolds. We have conducted an ethnographic analysis of several Wikipedia's terrorist attacks pages as well as interviews with regular Wikipedia's contributors. We document how Wikipedia is used during crisis by readers and contributors. Doing so, we identify a specific pace of contributions which provides reliable information to readers. By discussing the conditions of their trustworthiness, we highlight how historical sources (i.e. traditional media and authorities) support this pace. Our analyses demonstrate that citizens are engaging very quickly in processes of resilience and should be, therefore, considered as relevant partners by authorities when engaging a response to the crisis.
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Rob Grace. (2020). Hyperlocal Toponym Usage in Storm-Related Social Media. In Amanda Hughes, Fiona McNeill, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2020 Conference Proceedings – 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 849–859). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: Crisis responders need to locate events reported in social media messages that typically lack geographic metadata such as geotags. Toponyms, places names referenced in messages, provide another source of geographic information, however, the availability and granularity of toponyms in crisis social media remain poorly understood. This study examines toponym usage and granularity across six categories of crisis-related information posted on Twitter during a severe storm. Findings show users often include geographic information in messages describing local and remote storm events but do so rarely when discussing other topics, more often use toponyms than geotags when describing local events, and tend to include fine-grained toponyms in reports of infrastructure damage and service disruption and course-grained toponyms in other kinds of storm-related messages. These findings present requirements for hyperlocal geoparsing techniques and suggest that social media monitoring presents more immediate affordances for course-grained damage assessment than fine-grained situational awareness during a crisis.
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Richard McCreadie, Cody Buntain, & Ian Soboroff. (2020). Incident Streams 2019: Actionable Insights and How to Find Them. In Amanda Hughes, Fiona McNeill, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2020 Conference Proceedings – 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 744–760). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: The ubiquity of mobile internet-enabled devices combined with wide-spread social media use during emergencies is posing new challenges for response personnel. In particular, service operators are now expected to monitor these online channels to extract actionable insights and answer questions from the public. A lack of adequate tools makes this monitoring impractical at the scale of many emergencies. The TREC Incident Streams (TREC-IS) track drives research into solving this technology gap by bringing together academia and industry to develop techniques for extracting actionable insights from social media streams during emergencies. This paper covers the second year of TREC-IS, hosted in 2019 with two editions, 2019-A and 2019-B, contributing 12 new events and approximately 20,000 new tweets across 25 information categories, with 15 research groups participating across the world. This paper provides an overview of these new editions, actionable insights from data labelling, and the automated techniques employed by participant systems that appear most effective.
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