Helping Crisis Responders Find the Informative Needle in the Tweet Haystack

Leon Derczynski, Kenny Meesters, Diana Maynard, Kalina Bontcheva

Research output: Conference Article in Proceeding or Book/Report chapterArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Crisis responders are increasingly using social media, data and other digital sources of information to build a situational understanding of a crisis situation in order to design an effective response. However with the increased availability of such data, the challenge of identifying relevant information from it also increases. This paper presents a successful automatic approach to handling this problem. Messages are filtered for informativeness based on a definition of the concept drawn from prior research and crisis response experts. Informative messages are tagged for actionable data -- for example, people in need, threats to rescue efforts, changes in environment, and so on. In all, eight categories of actionability are identified. The two components -- informativeness and actionability classification -- are packaged together as an openly-available tool called Emina (Emergent Informativeness and Actionability).
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 15th ISCRAM Conference
Place of PublicationRochester, NY (USA)
PublisherRIT Scholar Works
Publication date2018
ISBN (Electronic)978-0-692-12760-5
Publication statusPublished - 2018
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Crisis Response
  • Social Media
  • Informative Data Filtering
  • Actionability Classification
  • Digital Information Tools

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