Alan Aipe, Asif Ekbal, Mukuntha NS, & Sadao Kurohashi. (2018). Linguistic Feature Assisted Deep Learning Approach towards Multi-label Classification of Crisis Related Tweets. In Kees Boersma, & Brian Tomaszeski (Eds.), ISCRAM 2018 Conference Proceedings – 15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 705–717). Rochester, NY (USA): Rochester Institute of Technology.
Abstract: Micro-blogging site like Twitter, over the last decade, has evolved into a proactive communication channel during mass convergence and emergency events, especially in crisis stricken scenarios. Extracting multiple levels of information associated with the overwhelming amount of social media data generated during such situations remains a great challenge to disaster-affected communities and professional emergency responders. These valuable data, segregated into different informative categories, can be leveraged by the government agencies, humanitarian communities as well as citizens to bring about faster response in areas of necessity. In this paper, we address the above scenario by developing a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for multi-label classification of crisis related tweets.We augment deep CNN by several linguistic features extracted from Tweet, and investigate their usage in classification. Evaluation on a benchmark dataset show that our proposed approach attains the state-of-the-art performance.
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Anna Kruspe, Jens Kersten, & Friederike Klan. (2019). Detecting event-related tweets by example using few-shot models. In Z. Franco, J. J. González, & J. H. Canós (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response And Management. Valencia, Spain: Iscram.
Abstract: Social media sources can be helpful in crisis situations, but discovering relevant messages is not trivial. Methods
have so far focused on universal detection models for all kinds of crises or for certain crisis types (e.g. floods).
Event-specific models could implement a more focused search area, but collecting data and training new models for
a crisis that is already in progress is costly and may take too much time for a prompt response. As a compromise,
manually collecting a small amount of example messages is feasible. Few-shot models can generalize to unseen
classes with such a small handful of examples, and do not need be trained anew for each event. We show how
these models can be used to detect crisis-relevant tweets during new events with just 10 to 100 examples and
counterexamples. We also propose a new type of few-shot model that does not require counterexamples.
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Zahra Ashktorab, Christopher Brown, Manojit Nandi, & Aron Culotta. (2014). Tweedr: Mining twitter to inform disaster response. In and P.C. Shih. L. Plotnick M. S. P. S.R. Hiltz (Ed.), ISCRAM 2014 Conference Proceedings – 11th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 354–358). University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University.
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce Tweedr, a Twitter-mining tool that extracts actionable information for disaster relief workers during natural disasters. The Tweedr pipeline consists of three main parts: classification, clustering and extraction. In the classification phase, we use a variety of classification methods (sLDA, SVM, and logistic regression) to identify tweets reporting damage or casualties. In the clustering phase, we use filters to merge tweets that are similar to one another; and finally, in the extraction phase, we extract tokens and phrases that report specific information about different classes of infrastructure damage, damage types, and casualties. We empirically validate our approach with tweets collected from 12 different crises in the United States since 2006.
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Benjamin Herfort, Melanie Eckle, & João Porto de Albuquerque. (2016). Being Specific about Geographic Information Crowdsourcing: A Typology and Analysis of the Missing Maps Project in South Kivu. 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: Recent development in disaster management and humanitarian aid is shaped by the rise of new information sources such as social media or volunteered geographic information. As these show great potential, making sense out of the new geographical datasets is a field of important scientific research. Therefore, this paper attempts to develop a typology of geographical information crowdsourcing. Furthermore, we use this typology to frame existing crowdsourcing projects and to further point out the potential of different kinds of crowdsourcing for disaster management and humanitarian aid. In order to exemplify its practical usage and value, we apply the typology to analyze the crowdsourcing methods utilized by the members of the Missing Maps project developed in South Kivu.
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Cornelia Caragea, Anna Squicciarini, Sam Stehle, Kishore Neppalli, & Andrea H. Tapia. (2014). Mapping moods: Geo-mapped sentiment analysis during hurricane sandy. In and P.C. Shih. L. Plotnick M. S. P. S.R. Hiltz (Ed.), ISCRAM 2014 Conference Proceedings – 11th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 642–651). University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University.
Abstract: Sentiment analysis has been widely researched in the domain of online review sites with the aim of generating summarized opinions of product users about different aspects of the products. However, there has been little work focusing on identifying the polarity of sentiments expressed by users during disaster events. Identifying sentiments expressed by users in an online social networking site can help understand the dynamics of the network, e.g., the main users' concerns, panics, and the emotional impacts of interactions among members. Data produced through social networking sites is seen as ubiquitous, rapid and accessible, and it is believed to empower average citizens to become more situationally aware during disasters and coordinate to help themselves. In this work, we perform sentiment classification of user posts in Twitter during the Hurricane Sandy and visualize these sentiments on a geographical map centered around the hurricane. We show how users' sentiments change according not only to users' locations, but also based on the distance from the disaster.
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Soudip Roy Chowdhury, Muhammad Imran, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Amer-Yahia, S., & Carlos Castillo. (2013). Tweet4act: Using incident-specific profiles for classifying crisis-related messages. In J. Geldermann and T. Müller S. Fortier F. F. T. Comes (Ed.), ISCRAM 2013 Conference Proceedings – 10th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 834–839). KIT; Baden-Baden: Karlsruher Institut fur Technologie.
Abstract: We present Tweet4act, a system to detect and classify crisis-related messages communicated over a microblogging platform. Our system relies on extracting content features from each message. These features and the use of an incident-specific dictionary allow us to determine the period type of an incident that each message belongs to. The period types are: Pre-incident (messages talking about prevention, mitigation, and preparedness), during-incident (messages sent while the incident is taking place), and post-incident (messages related to the response, recovery, and reconstruction). We show that our detection method can effectively identify incident-related messages with high precision and recall, and that our incident-period classification method outperforms standard machine learning classification methods.
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Cornelia Caragea, Adrian Silvescu, & Andrea Tapia. (2016). Identifying Informative Messages in Disasters using Convolutional Neural Networks. 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: Social media is a vital source of information during any major event, especially natural disasters. Data produced through social networking sites is seen as ubiquitous, rapid and accessible, and it is believed to empower average citizens to become more situationally aware during disasters and coordinate to help themselves. However, with the exponential increase in the volume of social media data, so comes the increase in data that are irrelevant to a disaster, thus, diminishing peoples? ability to find the information that they need in order to organize relief efforts, find help, and potentially save lives. In this paper, we present an approach to identifying informative messages in social media streams during disaster events. Our approach is based on Convolutional Neural Networks and shows significant improvement in performance over models that use the ?bag of words? and n-grams as features on several datasets of messages from flooding events.
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Dat T. Nguyen, Firoj Alam, Ferda Ofli, & Muhammad Imran. (2017). Automatic Image Filtering on Social Networks Using Deep Learning and Perceptual Hashing During Crises. 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. 499–511). Albi, France: Iscram.
Abstract: The extensive use of social media platforms, especially during disasters, creates unique opportunities for humanitarian organizations to gain situational awareness and launch relief operations accordingly. In addition to the textual content, people post overwhelming amounts of imagery data on social networks within minutes of a disaster hit. Studies point to the importance of this online imagery content for emergency response. Despite recent advances in the computer vision field, automatic processing of the crisis-related social media imagery data remains a challenging task. It is because a majority of which consists of redundant and irrelevant content. In this paper, we present an image processing pipeline that comprises de-duplication and relevancy filtering mechanisms to collect and filter social media image content in real-time during a crisis event. Results obtained from extensive experiments on real-world crisis datasets demonstrate the significance of the proposed pipeline for optimal utilization of both human and machine computing resources.
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Christoph Endres, Andreas Wurz, Marcus Hoffmann, & Alexander Behring. (2010). A task-based messaging approach to facilitate staff work. In C. Zobel B. T. S. French (Ed.), ISCRAM 2010 – 7th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management: Defining Crisis Management 3.0, Proceedings. Seattle, WA: Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM.
Abstract: A central part of the work in Incident Commands (ICs) deals with handling messages that contain relevant information. Classification schemes for messages can be exploited by command staff and assisting tools to support this work, given that a common understanding of the scheme is shared among participants. We present user studies on two such classifications, which imply some disagreement among participants. Interpretations of the studies and a revised scheme are presented. All users in our studies are highly trained experts and represent the state of the art in german IC work.
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Firoj Alam, Ferda Ofli, & Muhammad Imran. (2019). CrisisDPS: Crisis Data Processing Services. In Z. Franco, J. J. González, & J. H. Canós (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response And Management. Valencia, Spain: Iscram.
Abstract: Over the last few years, extensive research has been conducted to develop technologies to support humanitarian aid
tasks. However, many technologies are still limited as they require both manual and automatic approaches, and
more importantly, are not ready to be integrated into the disaster response workflows. To tackle this limitation, we
develop automatic data processing services that are freely and publicly available, and made to be simple, efficient,
and accessible to non-experts. Our services take textual messages (e.g., tweets, Facebook posts, SMS) as input to
determine (i) which disaster type the message belongs to, (ii) whether it is informative or not, and (iii) what type of
humanitarian information it conveys. We built our services upon machine learning classifiers that are obtained from
large-scale comparative experiments utilizing both classical and deep learning algorithms. Our services outperform
state-of-the-art publicly available tools in terms of classification accuracy.
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Firoj Alam, Ferda Ofli, Muhammad Imran, & Michael Aupetit. (2018). A Twitter Tale of Three Hurricanes: Harvey, Irma, and Maria. In Kees Boersma, & Brian Tomaszeski (Eds.), ISCRAM 2018 Conference Proceedings – 15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 553–572). Rochester, NY (USA): Rochester Institute of Technology.
Abstract: People increasingly use microblogging platforms such as Twitter during natural disasters and emergencies. Research studies have revealed the usefulness of the data available on Twitter for several disaster response tasks. However, making sense of social media data is a challenging task due to several reasons such as limitations of available tools to analyze high-volume and high-velocity data streams. This work presents an extensive multidimensional analysis of textual and multimedia content from millions of tweets shared on Twitter during the three disaster events. Specifically, we employ various Artificial Intelligence techniques from Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision fields, which exploit different machine learning algorithms to process the data generated during the disaster events. Our study reveals the distributions of various types of useful information that can inform crisis managers and responders as well as facilitate the development of future automated systems for disaster management.
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Hafiz Budi Firmansyah, Jesus Cerquides, & Jose Luis Fernandez-Marquez. (2022). Ensemble Learning for the Classification of Social Media Data in Disaster Response. In Rob Grace, & Hossein Baharmand (Eds.), ISCRAM 2022 Conference Proceedings – 19th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 710–718). Tarbes, France.
Abstract: Social media generates large amounts of almost real-time data which has proven valuable in disaster response. Specially for providing information within the first 48 hours after a disaster occurs. However, this potential is poorly exploited in operational environments due to the challenges of curating social media data. This work builds on top of the latest research on automatic classification of social media content, proposing the use of ensemble learning to help in the classification of social media images for disaster response. Ensemble methods use multiple learning algorithms to obtain better predictive performance than could be obtained from any of the constituent learning algorithms alone. Experimental results show that ensemble learning is a valuable technology for the analysis of social media images for disaster response,and could potentially ease the integration of social media data within an operational environment.
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Hemant Purohit, & Jennifer Chan. (2017). Classifying User Types on Social Media to inform Who-What-Where Coordination during Crisis Response. 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. 656–665). Albi, France: Iscram.
Abstract: Timely information is essential for better dynamic situational awareness, which leads to efficient resource planning, coordination, and action. However, given the scale and outreach of social media�a key information sharing platform during crises, diverse types of users participate in discussions during crises, which affect the vetting of information for dynamic situational awareness and response coordination activities. In this paper, we present a user analysis on Twitter during crises for three major user types�Organization, Organizationaffiliated (a person�s self-identifying affiliation with an organization in his/her profile), and Non-affiliated (person not identifying any affiliation), by first classifying users and then presenting their communication patterns during two recent crises. Our analysis shows distinctive patterns of the three user types for participation and communication on social media during crises. Such a user-centric approach to study information sharing during crisis events can act as a precursor to deeper domain-driven content analysis for response agencies.
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Hongmin Li, Doina Caragea, & Cornelia Caragea. (2017). Towards Practical Usage of a Domain Adaptation Algorithm in the Early Hours of a Disaster. 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. 692–704). Albi, France: Iscram.
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.
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Hongmin Li, Doina Caragea, & Cornelia Caragea. (2021). Combining Self-training with Deep Learning for Disaster Tweet Classification. 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. 719–730). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: Significant progress has been made towards automated classification of disaster or crisis related tweets using machine learning approaches. Deep learning models, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), domain adaptation approaches based on self-training, and approaches based on pre-trained language models, such as BERT, have been proposed and used independently for disaster tweet classification. In this paper, we propose to combine self-training with CNN and BERT models, respectively, to improve the performance on the task of identifying crisis related tweets in a target disaster where labeled data is assumed to be unavailable, while unlabeled data is available. We evaluate the resulting self-training models on three crisis tweet collections and find that: 1) the pre-trained language model BERTweet is better than the standard BERT model, when fine-tuned for downstream crisis tweets classification; 2) self-training can help improve the performance of the CNN and BERTweet models for larger unlabeled target datasets, but not for smaller datasets.
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Hongmin Li, Nicolais Guevara, Nic Herndon, Doina Caragea, Kishore Neppalli, Cornelia Caragea, et al. (2015). Twitter Mining for Disaster Response: A Domain Adaptation Approach. 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: Microblogging data such as Twitter data contains valuable information that has the potential to help improve the speed, quality, and efficiency of disaster response. Machine learning can help with this by prioritizing the tweets with respect to various classification criteria. However, supervised learning algorithms require labeled data to learn accurate classifiers. Unfortunately, for a new disaster, labeled tweets are not easily available, while they are usually available for previous disasters. Furthermore, unlabeled tweets from the current disaster are accumulating fast. We study the usefulness of labeled data from a prior source disaster, together with unlabeled data from the current target disaster to learn domain adaptation classifiers for the target. Experimental results suggest that, for some tasks, source data itself can be useful for classifying target data. However, for tasks specific to a particular disaster, domain adaptation approaches that use target unlabeled data in addition to source labeled data are superior.
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Hongmin Li, Xukun Li, Doina Caragea, & Cornelia Caragea. (2018). Comparison of Word Embeddings and Sentence Encodings for Generalized Representations in Crisis Tweet Classifications. In Kristin Stock, & Deborah Bunker (Eds.), Proceedings of ISCRAM Asia Pacific 2018: Innovating for Resilience – 1st International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Asia Pacific. (pp. 480–493). Albany, Auckland, New Zealand: Massey Univeristy.
Abstract: Many machine learning and natural language processing techniques, including supervised and domain adaptation algorithms, have been proposed and studied in the context of filtering crisis tweets. However, applying these approaches in real-time is still challenging because of time-critical requirements of emergency response operations and also diversities and unique characteristics of emergency events. In this paper, we explore the idea of building “generalized” classifiers for filtering crisis tweets that can be pre-trained, and are thus ready to use in real-time, while generalizing well on future disasters/crises data. We propose to achieve this using simple feature based adaptation with tweet representations based on word embeddings and also sentence-level embeddings, representations which do not rely on unlabeled data to achieve domain adaptations and can be easily implemented. Given that there are different types of word/sentence embeddings that are widely used, we propose to compare them to get a general idea about which type works better with crisis tweets classification tasks. Our experimental results show that GloVe embeddings in general work better with the datasets used in our evaluation, and that the supervised algorithms used in our experiments benefit from GloVe embeddings trained specifically on crisis data. Furthermore, our experimental results show that following GloVe, the sentence embeddings have great potential in crisis tweet tasks.
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Muhammad Imran, Carlos Castillo, Jesse Lucas, Patrick Meier, & Jakob Rogstadius. (2014). Coordinating human and machine intelligence to classify microblog communications in crises. In and P.C. Shih. L. Plotnick M. S. P. S.R. Hiltz (Ed.), ISCRAM 2014 Conference Proceedings – 11th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 712–721). University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University.
Abstract: An emerging paradigm for the processing of data streams involves human and machine computation working together, allowing human intelligence to process large-scale data. We apply this approach to the classification of crisis-related messages in microblog streams. We begin by describing the platform AIDR (Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response), which collects human annotations over time to create and maintain automatic supervised classifiers for social media messages. Next, we study two significant challenges in its design: (1) identifying which elements must be labeled by humans, and (2) determining when to ask for such annotations to be done. The first challenge is selecting the items to be labeled by crowd sourcing workers to maximize the productivity of their work. The second challenge is to schedule the work in order to reliably maintain high classification accuracy over time. We provide and validate answers to these challenges by extensive experimentation on real world datasets.
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Muhammad Imran, Shady Elbassuoni, Carlos Castillo, Fernando Díaz, & Patrick Meier. (2013). Extracting information nuggets from disaster- Related messages in social media. In J. Geldermann and T. Müller S. Fortier F. F. T. Comes (Ed.), ISCRAM 2013 Conference Proceedings – 10th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 791–801). KIT; Baden-Baden: Karlsruher Institut fur Technologie.
Abstract: Microblogging sites such as Twitter can play a vital role in spreading information during “natural” or man-made disasters. But the volume and velocity of tweets posted during crises today tend to be extremely high, making it hard for disaster-affected communities and professional emergency responders to process the information in a timely manner. Furthermore, posts tend to vary highly in terms of their subjects and usefulness; from messages that are entirely off-topic or personal in nature, to messages containing critical information that augments situational awareness. Finding actionable information can accelerate disaster response and alleviate both property and human losses. In this paper, we describe automatic methods for extracting information from microblog posts. Specifically, we focus on extracting valuable “information nuggets”, brief, self-contained information items relevant to disaster response. Our methods leverage machine learning methods for classifying posts and information extraction. Our results, validated over one large disaster-related dataset, reveal that a careful design can yield an effective system, paving the way for more sophisticated data analysis and visualization systems.
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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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Jeremy Diaz, Lise St. Denis, Maxwell B. Joseph, Kylen Solvik, & Jennifer K. Balch. (2020). Classifying Twitter Users for Disaster Response: A Highly Multimodal or Simple 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. 774–789). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: We report on the development of a classifier to identify Twitter users contributing first-hand information during a disaster. Identifying such users helps social media monitoring teams identify critical information that might otherwise slip through the cracks. A parallel study (St. Denis et al., 2020) demonstrates that Twitter user filtering creates an information-rich stream of content, but the best way to approach this task is unexplored. A user's profile contains many different “modalities” of data, including numbers, text, and images. To integrate these different data types, we constructed a multimodal neural network that combines the loss function of all modalities, and we compared the results to many individual unimodal models and a decision-level fusion approach. Analysis of the results suggests that unimodal models acting on Twitter users' recent tweets are sufficient for accurate classification. We demonstrate promising classification of Twitter users for crisis response with methods that are (1) easy to implement and (2) quick to both optimize and infer.
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Koki Asami, Shono Fujita, Kei Hiroi, & Michinori Hatayama. (2022). Data Augmentation with Synthesized Damaged Roof Images Generated by GAN. In Rob Grace, & Hossein Baharmand (Eds.), ISCRAM 2022 Conference Proceedings – 19th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 256–265). Tarbes, France.
Abstract: The lack of availability of large and diverse labeled datasets is one of the most critical issues in the use of machine learning in disaster prevention. Natural disasters are rare occurrences, which makes it difficult to collect sufficient disaster data for training machine learning models. The imbalance between disaster and non-disaster data affects the performance of machine learning algorithms. This study proposes a generative adversarial network (GAN)- based data augmentation, which generates realistic synthesized disaster data to expand the disaster dataset. The effect of the proposed augmentation was validated in the roof damage rate classification task, which improved the recall score by 11.4% on average for classes with small raw data and a high ratio of conventional augmentations such as rotation of image, and the overall recall score improved by 3.9%.
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Leon J. M. Rothkrantz, & Siska Fitrianie. (2015). Bayesian Classification of Disaster Events on the Basis of Icon Messages of Observers. 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: During major disaster events, human operators in a crisis center will be overloaded with under-stress a flood of phone calls. As an increasing number of people in and around big cities do not master the native language, the need for automated systems that automatically process the context and content of information about disaster situations from the communicated messages becomes apparent. To support language-independent communication and to reduce the ambiguity and multitude semantics, we developed an icon-based reporting observation system. Contrast to previous approaches of such a system, we link icon messages to disaster events without using Natural Language Processing. We developed a dedicated set of icons related to the context and characteristic features of disaster events. The developed system is able to compute the probability of the appearance of possible disaster events using Bayesian reasoning. In this paper, we present the reporting system, the developed icons, the Bayesian model, and the results of two experiments.
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Liuqing Li, & Edward A. Fox. (2019). Understanding patterns and mood changes through tweets about disasters. In Z. Franco, J. J. González, & J. H. Canós (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response And Management. Valencia, Spain: Iscram.
Abstract: We analyzed a sample of large tweet collections gathered since 2011, to expand understanding about tweeting
patterns and emotional responses of different types of tweeters regarding disasters. We selected three examples for
each of four disaster types: school shooting, bombing, earthquake, and hurricane. For each collection, we deployed
our novel model TwiRole for user classification, and an existing deep learning model for mood detection. We
found differences in the daily tweet count patterns, between the different types of events. Likewise, there were
different average scores and patterns of moods (fear, sadness, surprise), both between types of events, and between
events of the same type. Further, regarding surprise and fear, there were differences among roles of tweeters. These
results suggest the value of further exploration as well as hypothesis testing with our hundreds of event and trend
related tweet collections, considering indications in those that reflect emotional responses to disasters.
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Liuqing Li, & Edward A. Fox. (2020). Disaster Response Patterns across Different User Groups on Twitter: A Case Study during Hurricane Dorian. 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. 838–848). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: We conducted a case study analysis of disaster response patterns across different user groups during Hurricane Dorian in 2019. We built a tweet collection about the hurricane, covering a two week period. We divided Twitter users into two groups: brand/organization or individual. We found a significant difference in response patterns between the groups. Brand users increasingly participated as the disaster unfolded, and they posted more tweets than individual users on average. Regarding emotions, brand users posted more tweets with joy and surprise, while individual users posted more tweets with sadness. Fear was a common emotion between the two groups. Further, both groups used different types of hashtags and words in their tweets. Some distinct patterns were also discovered in their concerns on specific topics. These results suggest the value of further exploration with more tweet collections, considering the behavior of different user groups during disasters.
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