Abstract: Many machine learning techniques have been proposed to reduce the information overload in social media data during an emergency situation. Among such techniques, domain adaptation approaches present greater potential as compared to supervised algorithms because they don't require labeled data from the current disaster for training. However, the use of domain adaptation approaches in practice is sporadic at best. One reason is that domain adaptation algorithms have parameters that need to be tuned using labeled data from the target disaster, which is presumably not available. To address this limitation, we perform a study on one domain adaptation approach with the goal of understanding how much source data is needed to obtain good performance in a practical situation, and what parameter values of the approach give overall good performance. The results of our study provide useful insights into the practical application of domain adaptation algorithms in real crisis situations.