Robert Power, Bella Robinson, & Mark Cameron. (2023). Insights from a Decade of Twitter Monitoring for Emergency Management. In V. L. Thomas J. Huggins (Ed.), Proceedings of the ISCRAM Asia Pacific Conference 2022 (pp. 247–257). Palmerston North, New Zealand: Massey Unversity.
Abstract: The Emergency Situation Awareness (ESA) tool began as a research study into automated web text mining to support emergency management use cases. It started in late 2009 by investigating how people respond on Twitter to specific emergency events and we quickly realized that every emergency situation is different and preemptively defining keywords to search for content on Twitter beforehand would likely miss important information. So, in late September 2011 we established location-based searches with the aim of collecting all the tweets published in Australia and New Zealand. This was the beginning of over a decade of collecting and processing tweets to help emergency response agencies and crisis coordination centres use social media content as a new channel of information to support their work practices and to engage with the community impacted by emergency events. This journey has seen numerous challenges overcome to continuously maintain a tweet stream for an operational system. This experience allows us to derive insights into the changing use of Twitter over this time. In this paper we present some of the lessons we’ve learned from maintaining a Twitter monitoring system for emergency management use cases and we provide some insights into the changing nature of Twitter usage by users over this period.
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Jens Kersten, Jan Bongard, & Friederike Klan. (2022). Gaussian Processes for One-class and Binary Classification of Crisis-related Tweets. In Rob Grace, & Hossein Baharmand (Eds.), ISCRAM 2022 Conference Proceedings – 19th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 664–673). Tarbes, France.
Abstract: Overload reduction is essential to exploit Twitter text data for crisis management. Often used pre-trained machine learning models require training data for both, crisis-related and off-topic content. However, this task can also be formulated as a one-class classification problem in which labeled off-topic samples are not required. Gaussian processes (GPs) have great potential in both, binary and one-class settings and are therefore investigated in this work. Deep kernel learning combines the representative power of text embeddings with the Bayesian formalism of GPs. Motivated by this, we investigate the potential of deep kernel models for the task of classifying crisis-related tweet texts with special emphasis on cross-event applications. Compared to standard binary neural networks, first experiments with one-class GP models reveal a great potential for realistic scenarios, offering a fast and flexible approach for interactive model training without requiring off-topic training samples and comprehensive expert knowledge (only two model parameters involved).
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Gaëtan Caillaut, Cécile Gracianne, Nathalie Abadie, Guillaume Touya, & Samuel Auclair. (2022). Automated Construction of a French Entity Linking Dataset to Geolocate Social Network Posts in the Context of Natural Disasters. In Rob Grace, & Hossein Baharmand (Eds.), ISCRAM 2022 Conference Proceedings – 19th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 654–663). Tarbes, France.
Abstract: During natural disasters, automatic information extraction from Twitter posts is a valuable way to get a better overview of the field situation. This information has to be geolocated to support effective actions, but for the vast majority of tweets, spatial information has to be extracted from texts content. Despite the remarkable advances of the Natural Language Processing field, this task is still challenging for current state-of-the-art models because they are not necessarily trained on Twitter data and because high quality annotated data are still lacking for low resources languages. This research in progress address this gap describing an analytic pipeline able to automatically extract geolocatable entities from texts and to annotate them by aligning them with the entities present in Wikipedia/Wikidata resources. We present a new dataset for Entity Linking on French texts as preliminary results, and discuss research perspectives for enhancements over current state-of-the-art modeling for this task.
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Dario Salza, Edoardo Arnaudo, Giacomo Blanco, & Claudio Rossi. (2022). A 'Glocal' Approach for Real-time Emergency Event Detection in Twitter. In Rob Grace, & Hossein Baharmand (Eds.), ISCRAM 2022 Conference Proceedings – 19th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 570–583). Tarbes, France.
Abstract: Social media like Twitter offer not only an unprecedented amount of user-generated content covering developing emergencies but also act as a collector of news produced by heterogeneous sources, including big and small media companies as well as public authorities. However, this volume, velocity, and variety of data constitute the main value and, at the same time, the key challenge to implement and automatic detection and tracking of independent emergency events from the real-time stream of tweets. Leveraging online clustering and considering both textual and geographical features, we propose, implement, and evaluate an algorithm to automatically detect emergency events applying a ‘glocal’ approach, i.e., offering a global coverage while detecting events at local (municipality level) scale.
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Cody Buntain, Richard Mccreadie, & Ian Soboroff. (2022). Incident Streams 2021 Off the Deep End: Deeper Annotations and Evaluations in Twitter. In Rob Grace, & Hossein Baharmand (Eds.), ISCRAM 2022 Conference Proceedings – 19th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 584–604). Tarbes, France.
Abstract: This paper summarizes the final year of the four-year Text REtrieval Conference Incident Streams track (TREC-IS), which has produced a large dataset comprising 136,263 annotated tweets, spanning 98 crisis events. Goals of this final year were twofold: 1) to add new categories for assessing messages, with a focus on characterizing the audience, author, and images associated with these messages, and 2) to enlarge the TREC-IS dataset with new events, with an emphasis of deeper pools for sampling. Beyond these two goals, TREC-IS has nearly doubled the number of annotated messages per event for the 26 crises introduced in 2021 and has released a new parallel dataset of 312,546 images associated with crisis content – with 7,297 tweets having annotations about their embedded images. Our analyses of this new crisis data yields new insights about the context of a tweet; e.g., messages intended for a local audience and those that contain images of weather forecasts and infographics have higher than average assessments of priority but are relatively rare. Tweets containing images, however, have higher perceived priorities than tweets without images. Moving to deeper pools, while tending to lower classification performance, also does not generally impact performance rankings or alter distributions of information-types. We end this paper with a discussion of these datasets, analyses, their implications, and how they contribute both new data and insights to the broader crisis informatics community.
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