Summarizing Situational Tweets in Crisis Scenario

Abstract

During mass convergence events such as natural disasters, microblogging platforms like Twitter are widely used by affected people to post situational awareness messages. These crisis-related messages disperse among multiple categories like infrastructure damage, information about missing, injured, and dead people etc. The challenge here is to extract important situational updates from these messages, assign them appropriate informational categories, and finally summarize big trove of information in each category. In this paper, we propose a novel framework which first assigns tweets into different situational classes and then summarize those tweets. In the summarization phase, we propose a two stage summarization framework which first extracts a set of important tweets from the whole set of information through an Integer-linear programming (ILP) based optimization technique and then follows a word graph and content word based abstractive summarization technique to produce the final summary. Our method is time and memory efficient and outperforms the baseline in terms of quality, coverage of events, locations et al., effectiveness, and utility in disaster scenarios.