Abstract
Social media is a platform to express one’s view in real time. This real time nature of social media makes it an attractive tool for disaster management, as both victims and officials can put their problems and solutions at the same place in real time. We investigate the Twitter post in a flood related disaster and propose an algorithm to identify victims asking for help. The developed system takes tweets as inputs and categorizes them into high or low priority tweets. User location of high priority tweets with no location information is predicted based on historical locations of the users using the Markov model. The system is working well, with its classification accuracy of 81%, and location prediction accuracy of 87%. The present system can be extended for use in other natural disaster situations, such as earthquake, tsunami, etc., as well as man-made disasters such as riots, terrorist attacks etc. The present system is first of its kind, aimed at helping victims during disasters based on their tweets.
Highlights
The use of social media is being explored as a tool for disaster management by developers, researchers, government agencies and businesses
We proposed a tweet classification system to identify tweets from disaster victims asking for help
The user location is estimated from their old tweets, if the location is not mentioned in the current tweet
Summary
The use of social media is being explored as a tool for disaster management by developers, researchers, government agencies and businesses. Social media platforms can be efficiently used for supply chain management by professionals, organizations, and retailers for their operations (Chae 2015; Mishra and Singh 2016; Papadopoulos et al 2017). As suggested by Comfort et al (2012), a more systematic study of social media is needed to improve public response. Quick and accurate responses from the leaders during disaster may boost their personal political standing (Ulku et al 2015). Several agencies such as BMKG in Indonesia are actively engaged in providing updates and warnings to public through Twitter. Social media is used by various agencies to coordinate rescue efforts and help victims
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