Classification of Short-Texts Generated During Disasters: A Deep Neural Network Based Approach

Abstract

Micro-blogging sites provide a wealth of resources during disaster events in the form of short texts. Correct classification of these text data into various actionable classes can be of great help in shaping the means to rescue people in disaster-affected places. The process of classification of these text data poses a challenging problem because the texts are usually short and very noisy and finding good features that can distinguish these texts into different classes is time consuming, tedious and often requires a lot of domain knowledge. We propose a deep learning based model to classify tweets into different actionable classes such as resource need and availability, activities of various NGO etc. Our model requires no domain knowledge and can be used in any disaster scenario with little to no modification.