Evolution of communities on Twitter and the role of their leaders during emergencies

Abstract

Twitter is presently utilized as a channel of communication and information dissemination. At present, government and non-government emergency management organizations utilize Twitter to disseminate emergency relevant information. However, these organizations have limited ability to evaluate the Twitter communication in order to discover communication patterns, key players, and messages that are being propagated through Twitter regarding the event. More importantly there is a general lack of knowledge of who are the individuals or organizations that disseminate warning information, provide confirmations of an event and associated actions, and urge others to take action. This paper presents a methodology that shows how Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) can aid in addressing these issues. The methodology, in addition to qualitative data collected during on-site interviews and publicly available information, was successfully applied to a Twitter data set collected during 2011 Japan tsunami. NLP techniques were applied to extract actionable messages. Based on the messages extracted by NLP, SNA was used to construct a network of actionable messages. While SNA discovered communities and extracted the community leaders, NLP was used to determine the behavior of the community members and the role of the community leaders. Therefore, the proposed methodology automatically finds communities, evaluates its members' behaviors, and authenticates cohesive behaviors of the community members during emergencies. Moreover, the methodology efficiently finds the leaders of the communities, while also identifying their role in communities.