Basanta Chaulagain, Aman Shakya, Bhuwan Bhatt, Dip Kiran Pradhan Newar, Sanjeeb Prasad Panday, & Rom Kant Pandey. (2019). Casualty Information Extraction and Analysis from News. 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: During unforeseen situations of crisis such as disasters and accidents we usually have to rely on local news reports for the latest updates on casualties. The information in such feeds is in unstructured text format, however, structured data is required for analysis and visualization. This paper presents a system for automatic extraction and visualization of casualty information from news articles. A prototype online system has been implemented and tested with local news feed of road accidents. The system extracts information regarding number of deaths, injuries, date, location, and vehicles involved using techniques like Named Entity Recognition, Semantic Role Labeling and Regular expressions. The entities were manually annotated and compared with the results obtained from the system. Initial results are promising with good accuracy overall. Moreover, the system maintains an online database of casualties and provides information visualization and filtering interfaces for analysis.
|
Cruz, J. A. dela, Hendrickx, I., & Larson, M. (2023). Towards XAI for Information Extraction on Online Media Data for Disaster Risk Management. In Jaziar Radianti, Ioannis Dokas, Nicolas Lalone, & Deepak Khazanchi (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International ISCRAM Conference (pp. 478–486). Omaha, USA: University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Abstract: Disaster risk management practitioners have the responsibility to make decisions at every phase of the disaster risk management cycle: mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. The decisions they make affect human life. In this paper, we consider the current state of the use of AI in information extraction (IE) for disaster risk management (DRM), which makes it possible to leverage disaster information in social media. We consolidate the challenges and concerns of using AI for DRM into three main areas: limitations of DRM data, limitations of AI modeling and DRM domain-specific concerns, i.e., bias, privacy and security, transparency and accountability, and hype and inflated expectations. Then, we present a systematic discussion of how explainable AI (XAI) can address the challenges and concerns of using AI for IE in DRM.
|
Fedor Vitiugin, & Carlos Castillo. (2019). Comparison of Social Media in English and Russian During Emergencies and Mass Convergence Events. 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: Twitter is used for spreading information during crisis events. In this paper, we first retrieve event-related information
posted in English and Russian during six disasters and sports events that received wide media coverage in both
languages, using an adaptive information filtering method for automating the collection of about 100 000 messages.
We then compare the contents of these messages in terms of 17 informational and linguistic features using a
difference in differences approach. Our results suggest that posts in each language are focused on different types
of information. For instance, almost 50% of the popular people mentioned in these messages appear exclusively
in either the English messages or the Russian messages, but not both. Our results also suggest differences in the
adoption of platform mechanics during crises between Russian-speaking and English-speaking users. This has
important implications for data collection during crises, which is almost always focused on a single language.
|
Kiran Zahra, Rahul Deb Das, Frank O. Ostermann, & Ross S. Purves. (2022). Towards an Automated Information Extraction Model from Twitter Threads during Disasters. In Rob Grace, & Hossein Baharmand (Eds.), ISCRAM 2022 Conference Proceedings – 19th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 637–653). Tarbes, France.
Abstract: Social media plays a vital role as a communication source during large-scale disasters. The unstructured and informal nature of such short individual posts makes it difficult to extract useful information, often due to a lack of additional context. The potential of social media threads– sequences of posts– has not been explored as a source of adding context and more information to the initiating post. In this research, we explored Twitter threads as an information source and developed an information extraction model capable of extracting relevant information from threads posted during disasters. We used a crowdsourcing platform to determine whether a thread adds more information to the initial tweet and defined disaster-related information present in these threads into six themes– event reporting, location, time, intensity, casualty and damage reports, and help calls. For these themes, we created the respective thematic lexicons from WordNet. Moreover, we developed and compared four information extraction models trained on GloVe, word2vec, bag-of-words, and thematic bag-of-words to extract and summarize the most critical information from the threads. Our results reveal that 70 percent of all threads add information to the initiating post for various disaster-related themes. Furthermore, the thematic bag-of-words information extraction model outperforms the other algorithms and models for preserving the highest number of disaster-related themes.
|
Nasik Muhammad Nafi, Avishek Bose, Sarthak Khanal, Doina Caragea, & William H. Hsu. (2020). Abstractive Text Summarization of Disaster-Related Documents. 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. 881–892). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: Abstractive summarization is intended to capture key information from the full text of documents. In the application domain of disaster and crisis event reporting, key information includes disaster effects, cause, and severity. While some researches regarding information extraction in the disaster domain have focused on keyphrase extraction from short disaster-related texts like tweets, there is hardly any work that attempts abstractive summarization of long disaster-related documents. Following the recent success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in other domains, we leverage an RL-based state-of-the-art approach in abstractive summarization to summarize disaster-related documents. RL enables an agent to find an optimal policy by maximizing some reward. We design a novel hybrid reward metric for the disaster domain by combining \underline{Vec}tor Similarity and \underline{Lex}icon Matching (\textit{VecLex}) to maximize the relevance of the abstract to the source document while focusing on disaster-related keywords. We evaluate the model on a disaster-related subset of a CNN/Daily Mail dataset consisting of 104,913 documents. The results show that our approach produces more informative summaries and achieves higher \textit{VecLex} scores compared to the baseline.
|
Sara Barozzi, Jose Luis Fernandez Marquez, Amudha Ravi Shankar, & Barbara Pernici. (2019). Filtering images extracted from social media in the response phase of emergency events. 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: The use of social media to support emergency operators in the first hours of the response phases can improve the
quality of the information available and awareness on ongoing emergency events. Social media contain both textual
and visual information, in the form of pictures and videos. The problem related to the use of social media posts
as a source of information during emergencies lies in the difficulty of selecting the relevant information among
a very large amount of irrelevant information. In particular, we focus on the extraction of images relevant to an
event for rapid mapping purpose. In this paper, a set of possible filters is proposed and analyzed with the goal of
selecting useful images from posts and of evaluating how precision and recall are impacted. Filtering techniques,
which include both automated and crowdsourced steps, have the goal of providing better quality posts and easy
manageable data volumes both to emergency responders and rapid mapping operators. The impact of the filters on
precision and recall in extracting relevant images is discussed in the paper in two different case studies.
|
Teun Terpstra, Richard Stronkman, Arnout De Vries, & Geerte L. Paradies. (2012). Towards a realtime Twitter analysis during crises for operational crisis management. In Z.Franco J. R. L. Rothkrantz (Ed.), ISCRAM 2012 Conference Proceedings – 9th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Vancouver, BC: Simon Fraser University.
Abstract: Today's crises attract great attention on social media, from local and distant citizens as well as from news media. This study investigates the possibilities of real-time and automated analysis of Twitter messages during crises. The analysis was performed through application of an information extraction tool to nearly 97,000 tweets that were published shortly before, during and after a storm hit the Pukkelpop 2011 festival in Belgium. As soon as the storm hit the festival tweet activity increased exponentially, peaking at 576 tweets per minute. The extraction tool enabled analyzing tweets through predefined (geo)graphical displays, message content filters (damage, casualties) and tweet type filters (e.g., retweets). Important topics that emerged were 'early warning tweets', 'rumors' and the 'self-organization of disaster relief' on Twitter. Results indicate that automated filtering of information provides valuable information for operational response and crisis communication. Steps for further research are discussed. © 2012 ISCRAM.
|