Yudi Chen, Angel Umana, Chaowei Yang, & Wenying Ji. (2021). Condition Sensing for Electricity Infrastructures in Disasters by Mining Public Topics from Social Media. In Anouck Adrot, Rob Grace, Kathleen Moore, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2021 Conference Proceedings – 18th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 598–608). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: Timely and reliable sensing of infrastructure conditions is critical in disaster management for planning effective infrastructure restorations. Social media, a near real-time information source, has been widely used in the disaster domain for building timely, general situational awareness, such as urgent public needs and donations. However, the employment of social media for sensing electricity infrastructure conditions has yet been explored. This study aims to address the research gap to sense electricity infrastructure conditions through mining public topics from social media. To achieve this purpose, we proposed a systematic and customized approach wherein (1) electricity-related social media data is extracted by the classifier developed based on Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT); and (2) public topics are modeled with unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams to incorporate the formulaic expressions of infrastructure conditions in social media. Electricity infrastructures in Florida impacted by Hurricane Irma are studied for illustration and demonstration. Results show that the proposed approach is capable of sensing the temporal evolutions and geographic differences of electricity infrastructure conditions.
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