Extracting Situational Information from Microblogs during Disaster Events

Abstract

Microblogging sites like Twitter have become important sources of real-time information during disaster events. A significant amount of valuable situational information is available in these sites; however, this information is immersed among hundreds of thousands of tweets, mostly containing sentiments and opinion of the masses, that are posted during such events. To effectively utilize microblogging sites during disaster events, it is necessary to (i) extract the situational information from among the large amounts of sentiment and opinion, and (ii) summarize the situational information, to help decision-making processes when time is critical. In this paper, we develop a novel framework which first classifies tweets to extract situational information, and then summarizes the information. The proposed framework takes into consideration the typicalities pertaining to disaster events where (i) the same tweet often contains a mixture of situational and non-situational information, and (ii) certain numerical information, such as number of casualties, vary rapidly with time, and thus achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art tweet summarization approaches.