Infrastructure Ombudsman: Mining Future Failure Concerns from Structural Disaster Response

Md Towhidul Absar Chowdhury, Soumyajit Datta, Naveen Sharma, Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh

Abstract: Current research concentrates on studying discussions on social media related to structural failures to improve disaster response strategies. However, detecting social web posts discussing concerns about anticipatory failures is under-explored. If such concerns are channeled to the appropriate authorities, it can aid in the prevention and mitigation of potential infrastructural failures. In this paper, we develop an infrastructure ombudsman -- that automatically detects specific infrastructure concerns. Our work considers several recent structural failures in the US. We present a first-of-its-kind dataset of 2,662 social web instances for this novel task mined from Reddit and YouTube.