Title
Pulling Information from social media in the aftermath of unpredictable disasters
Abstract
Social media have become a primary communication channel among people and are continuously overwhelmed by huge volumes of User Generated Content. This is especially true in the aftermath of unpredictable disasters, when users report facts, descriptions and photos of the unfolding event. This material contains actionable information that can greatly help rescuers to achieve a better response to crises, but its volume and variety render manual processing unfeasible. This paper reports the experience we gained from developing and using a web-enabled system for the online detection and monitoring of unpredictable events such as earthquakes and floods. The system captures selected message streams from Twitter and offers decision support functionalities for acquiring situational awareness from textual content and for quantifying the impact of disasters. The software architecture of the system is described and the approaches adopted for messages filtering, emergency detection and emergency monitoring are discussed. For each module, the results of real-world experiments are reported. The modular design makes the system easy configurable and allowed us to conduct experiments on different crises, including Emilia earthquake in 2012 and Genoa flood in 2014. Finally, some possible functionalities relying on the analysis of multimedia information are introduced.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/ICT-DM.2015.7402058
2015 2nd International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Disaster Management (ICT-DM)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Web disaster management,social media mining,human safety,crisis informatics,Twitter
User-generated content,Social media,Situation awareness,Computer science,Computer security,Decision support system,Communication channel,Modular design,Software architecture,Flood myth
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2469-8822
7
0.52
References 
Authors
17
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marco Avvenuti126724.14
Fabio Del Vigna2232.44
Cresci, S.323521.79
Andrea Marchetti4948.59
Maurizio Tesconi528132.06