Automatic analysis of microblogging data to aid in emergency management

Abstract

Microblogging platforms like Twitter, in the recent years, have become one of the important sources of information for a wide spectrum of users. As a result, these platforms have become great resources to provide support for emergency management. During any crisis, it is necessary to sieve through a huge amount of social media texts within a short span of time to extract meaningful information from them. Extraction of emergency-specific information, such as topic keywords or landmarks or geo-locations of sites, from these texts plays a significant role in building an application for emergency management. This paper thus highlights different aspects of automatic analysis of tweets to help in developing such an application. Hence, it focuses on: (1) identification of crisis-related tweets using machine learning, (2) exploration of topic model implementations and looking at its effectiveness on short messages (as short as 140 characters); and performing an exploratory data analysis on short texts related to crises collected from Twitter, and looking at different visualizations to understand the commonality and differences between topics and different crisis-related data, and (3) providing a proof of concept for identifying and retrieving different geo-locations from tweets and extracting the GPS coordinates from this data to approximately plot them in a map.