Abstract
Social media data created a paradigm shift in assessing situational awareness during a natural disaster or emergencies such as wildfire, hurricane, tropical storm etc. Twitter as an emerging data source is an effective and innovative digital platform to observe trend from social media users’ perspective who are direct or indirect witnesses of the calamitous event. This paper aims to collect and analyze twitter data related to the recent wildfire in California to perform a trend analysis by classifying firsthand and credible information from Twitter users. This work investigates tweets on the recent wildfire in California and classifies them based on witnesses into two types: 1) direct witnesses and 2) indirect witnesses. The collected and analyzed information can be useful for law enforcement agencies and humanitarian organizations for communication and verification of the situational awareness during wildfire hazards. Trend analysis is an aggregated approach that includes sentimental analysis and topic modeling performed through domain-expert manual annotation and machine learning. Trend analysis ultimately builds a fine-grained analysis to assess evacuation routes and provide valuable information to the firsthand emergency responders.
Highlights
This paper aims to collect and analyze twitter data related to the recent wildfire in California to perform a trend analysis by classifying firsthand and credible information from Twitter users
This study aims at minimizing the above-mentioned knowledge gap by developing a framework for trend analysis based on Twitter data collected during the California wildfire
Trend analysis conducted in this study tested the developed approach to identify tweets that indicate useful information related to evacuation, emergency response and disaster management, reflecting actual situations during wildfires
Summary
Social media platforms widened the sources of getting crisis-related information [6]. With this fact, research on the use of communication tools during a crisis has emerged considering the attention any crisis attracts on social media [7]. Twitter is considered to be an actively influential source of information that arouses situational awareness regarding any crisis [8]. The possible and clear detection of rumors indicates that Twitter could be a reliable source of information during a crisis. Recent study shows that the use of microblogging platform during California wildfires can be a reliable source to predict air quality [11]
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