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Tom Wilson, Stephanie A. Stanek, Emma S. Spiro, & Kate Starbird. (2017). Language Limitations in Rumor Research? Comparing French and English Tweets Sent During the 2015 Paris Attacks. In eds Aurélie Montarnal Matthieu Lauras Chihab Hanachi F. B. Tina Comes (Ed.), Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response And Management (pp. 546–553). Albi, France: Iscram.
Abstract: The ubiquity of social media facilitates widespread participation in crises. As individuals converge online to understand a developing situation, rumors can emerge. Little is currently known about how online rumoring behavior varies by language. Exploring a rumor from the 2015 Paris Attacks, we investigate Twitter rumoring behaviors across two languages: French, the primary language of the affected population; and English, the dominant language of Internet communication. We utilize mixed methods to qualitatively code and quantitatively analyze rumoring behaviors across French and English language tweets. Most interestingly, temporal engagement in the rumor varies across languages, but proportions of tweets affirming and denying a rumor are very similar. Analyzing tweet deletions and retweet counts, we find slight (but not significant) differences between languages. This work offers insight into potential limitations of previous research of online rumoring, which often focused exclusively on English language content, and demonstrates the importance of considering language in future work.
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Venkata Kishore Neppalli, Cornelia Caragea, & Doina Caragea. (2018). Deep Neural Networks versus Naive Bayes Classifiers for Identifying Informative Tweets during Disasters. In Kees Boersma, & Brian Tomaszeski (Eds.), ISCRAM 2018 Conference Proceedings – 15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 677–686). Rochester, NY (USA): Rochester Institute of Technology.
Abstract: In this paper, we focus on understanding the effectiveness of deep neural networks by comparison with the effectiveness of standard classifiers that use carefully engineered features. Specifically, we design various feature sets (based on tweet content, user details and polarity clues) and use these feature sets individually or in various combinations, with Naïve Bayes classifiers. Furthermore, we develop neural models based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) with handcrafted architectures. We compare the two types of approaches in the context of identifying informative tweets posted during disasters, and show that the deep neural networks, in particular the CNN networks, are more effective for the task considered.
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Venkata Kishore Neppalli, Murilo Cerqueira Medeiros, Cornelia Caragea, Doina Caragea, Andrea Tapia, & Shane Halse. (2016). Retweetability Analysis and Prediction during Hurricane Sandy. In A. Tapia, P. Antunes, V.A. Bañuls, K. Moore, & J. Porto (Eds.), ISCRAM 2016 Conference Proceedings ? 13th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil: Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Abstract: Twitter is a very important source for obtaining information, especially during events such as natural disasters. Users can spread information in Twitter either by crafting new posts, which are called ?tweets,? or by using retweet mechanism to re-post the previously created tweets. During natural disasters, identifying how likely a tweet is to be highly retweeted is very important since it can help promote the spread of good information in a network such as Twitter, as well as it can help stop the spread of misinformation, when corroborated with approaches that identify trustworthy information or misinformation, respectively. In this paper, we present an analysis on retweeted tweets to determine several aspects affecting retweetability. We then extract features from tweets? content and user account information and perform experiments to develop models that automatically predict the retweetability of a tweet in the context of the Hurricane Sandy.
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William R. Smith, Keri K. Stephens, Brett Robertson, Jing Li, & Dhiraj Murthy. (2018). Social Media in Citizen-Led Disaster Response: Rescuer Roles, Coordination Challenges, and Untapped Potential. In Kees Boersma, & Brian Tomaszeski (Eds.), ISCRAM 2018 Conference Proceedings – 15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 639–648). Rochester, NY (USA): Rochester Institute of Technology.
Abstract: Widespread disasters can overload official agencies' capacity to provide assistance, and often citizen-led groups emerge to assist with disaster response. As social media platforms have expanded, emergent rescue groups have many ways to harness network and mobile tools to coordinate actions and help fellow citizens. This study used semi-structured interviews and photo elicitation techniques to better understand how wide-scale rescues occurred during the 2017 Hurricane Harvey flooding in the Greater Houston, Texas USA area. We found that citizens used diverse apps and social media-related platforms during these rescues and that they played one of three roles: rescuer, dispatcher, or information compiler. The key social media coordination challenges these rescuers faced were incomplete feedback loops, unclear prioritization, and communication overload. This work-in-progress paper contributes to the field of crisis and disaster response research by sharing the nuances in how citizens use social media to respond to calls for help from flooding victims.
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Yajie Li, Amanda Lee Hughes, & Peter D. Howe. (2018). Communicating Crisis with Persuasion: Examining Official Twitter Messages on Heat Hazards. In Kees Boersma, & Brian Tomaszeski (Eds.), ISCRAM 2018 Conference Proceedings – 15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 469–479). Rochester, NY (USA): Rochester Institute of Technology.
Abstract: Official crisis messages need to be persuasive to promote appropriate public responses. However, little research has examined the content of crisis messages from a persuasion perspective, especially for natural hazards. This study deductively identifies five persuasive message factors (PMFs) applicable to natural hazards, including two under-examined health-related PMFs: health risk susceptibility and health impact. Using 2016 heat hazards as a case study, this paper content-analyzes heat-related Twitter messages (N=904) posted by eighteen U.S. National Weather Service Weather Forecast Offices according to the five PMFs. We find that the use of descriptions of hazard intensity is disproportionately high, with a lack of use of other PMFs. We also describe different types of statements used to signal the two health-related PMFs. We conclude with implications and recommendations relevant to practitioners and researchers in social media crisis communication.
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Yang Ishigaki, Yoshinori Matsumoto, Yutaka Matsuno, & Kenji Tanaka. (2015). Participatory Radiation Information Monitoring with SNS after Fukushima. In L. Palen, M. Buscher, T. Comes, & A. Hughes (Eds.), ISCRAM 2015 Conference Proceedings ? 12th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Kristiansand, Norway: University of Agder (UiA).
Abstract: We developed a series of inexpensive but accurate mobile radiation detectors, which we named Pocket Geiger (POKEGA), to address the urgent desire of ordinary people to measure and share radiation levels in their milieus and to discuss the results of the Nuclear Disaster in Fukushima, Japan. This action research reports on a new style of pragmatic model of radiation monitoring, which employs the features of Participatory Design and Participatory Sensing and adopts modern communication platforms such as crowd-funding, open source development, and Facebook. This paper proposes an interaction model between the project management body, and other inclusive corroborators, e.g., ordinary users and experts, and focuses on three development phases of the project: start-up phase, evaluation phase, and operation phase. This paper also considers a reliability assurance model on disaster information sharing between the citizen layer and the official layer by data sharing and discussion activities in the POKEGA community.
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Yang Zhang, William Drake, Yuhong Li, Christopher Zobel, & Margaret Cowell. (2015). Fostering Community Resilience through Adaptive Learning in a Social Media Age: Municipal Twitter Use in New Jersey following Hurricane Sandy. In L. Palen, M. Buscher, T. Comes, & A. Hughes (Eds.), ISCRAM 2015 Conference Proceedings ? 12th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Kristiansand, Norway: University of Agder (UiA).
Abstract: Adaptive learning capacity is a critical component of community resilience that describes the ability of a community to effectively gauge its vulnerability to the external environment and to make appropriate changes to its coping strategies. Traditionally, the relationship between government and community learning was framed within a deterministic paradigm. Learning outcomes were understood to result from the activities of central actors (i.e., government) and flow passively into the community. The emergence of social media is fundamentally changing the ways organizations and individuals collect and share information. Despite its growing acceptance, it remains to be determined how this shift in communication will ultimately affect community adaptive learning, and therefore, community resilience. This paper presents the initial results of a mixed-methods research effort that examined the use of Twitter in local municipalities from Monmouth County, NJ after Hurricane Sandy. Using a conceptual model of organizational learning, we examine the learning outcomes following the Hurricane Sandy experience.
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Yuhong Li, & Christopher Zobel. (2016). Small Businesses and Social Media Usage in the 2013 Colorado Floods. In A. Tapia, P. Antunes, V.A. Bañuls, K. Moore, & J. Porto (Eds.), ISCRAM 2016 Conference Proceedings ? 13th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil: Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Abstract: The recovery of small businesses from a disaster is critical to community recovery. Such businesses can be extremely vulnerable to disasters, particularly because they often occupy a single location and have a localized customer base. Although social media is an effective platform for information dissemination, and has been extensively used in a disaster context, the way in which small businesses use social media in this context, and the effectiveness of those efforts, are still not well understood. With this in mind, this paper uses the 2013 floods along the Front Range in Colorado as a case study to help improve our understanding of how small businesses use social media in disaster situations. Characterizing the organizations' behavior involves using both qualitative and quantitative approaches, and the paper focuses on an initial qualitative analysis.
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Zoha Sheikh, Hira Masood, Sharifullah Khan, & Muhammad Imran. (2017). User-Assisted Information Extraction from Twitter During Emergencies. In eds Aurélie Montarnal Matthieu Lauras Chihab Hanachi F. B. Tina Comes (Ed.), Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response And Management (pp. 684–691). Albi, France: Iscram.
Abstract: Disasters and emergencies bring uncertain situations. People involved in such situations look for quick answers to their rapid queries. Moreover, humanitarian organizations look for situational awareness information to launch relief operations. Existing studies show the usefulness of social media content during crisis situations. However, despite advances in information retrieval and text processing techniques, access to relevant information on Twitter is still a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to provide timely access to the relevant information on Twitter. Specifically, we employee Word2vec embeddings to expand initial users queries and based on a relevance feedback mechanism we retrieve relevant messages on Twitter in real-time. Initial experiments and user studies performed using a real world disaster dataset show the significance of the proposed approach.
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