Using social media for classifying actionable insights in disaster scenario

Samujjwal Ghosh, PK Srijith, Maunendra Sankar Desarkar

Abstract: Micro-blogging sites are an important source of real-time situational information during disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, flood etc. Such disasters cause miseries in the lives of affected people. Timely identification of steps needed to help the affected people in such situations can mitigate those miseries to large extent. In this paper, we focus on the problem of automated classification of the disaster related tweets to a set of predefined categories. Some example categories considered are resource availability, resource requirement, infrastructure damage etc. Proper annotation of the tweets with these class information can help in timely determination of the steps needed to be taken to address the concerns of the people in the affected areas. Depending on the information types or categories, different feature sets might be useful for proper identification of posts belonging to that category. In this work, we define multiple feature sets and use them with various supervised classification algorithms from literature to study the effectiveness of our approach in annotating the tweets with their appropriate information categories.