Social media data analysis framework for disaster response

Abstract

This paper presents a social media data analysis framework applied to multiple datasets. The method developed uses machine learning classifiers, where filtering binary classifiers based on deep bidirectional neural networks are trained on benchmark datasets of disaster responses for earthquakes and floods and extreme flood events. The classifiers consist of learning from discrete handcrafted features and fine-tuning approaches using deep bidirectional Transformer neural networks on these disaster response datasets. With the development of the multiclass classification approach, we compare the state-of-the-art results in one of the benchmark datasets containing the largest number of disaster-related categories. The multiclass classification approaches developed in this research with support vector machines provide a precision of 0.83 and 0.79 compared to Bernoulli naïve Bayes, which are 0.59 and 0.76, and multinomial naïve Bayes, which are 0.79 and 0.91, respectively. The binary classification methods based on the MDRM dataset show a higher precision with deep learning methods (DistilBERT) than BoW and TF-IDF, while in the case of UnifiedCEHMET dataset show a high performance for accuracy with the deep learning method in terms of severity, with a precision of 0.92 compared to BoW and TF-IDF method which has a precision of 0.68 and 0.70, respectively.