Abstract
This article addresses the problem of detecting crisis‐related messages on social media, in order to improve the situational awareness of emergency services. Previous work focused on developing machine‐learning classifiers restricted to specific disasters, such as storms or wildfires. We investigate for the first time methods to detect such messages where the type of the crisis is not known in advance, that is, the data are highly heterogeneous. Data heterogeneity causes significant difficulties for learning algorithms to generalize and accurately label incoming data. Our main contributions are as follows. First, we evaluate the extent of this problem in the context of disaster management, finding that the performance of traditional learners drops by up to 40% when trained and tested on heterogeneous data vis‐á‐vis homogeneous data. Then, in order to overcome data heterogeneity, we propose a new ensemble learning method, and found this to perform on a par with the Gradient Boosting and AdaBoost ensemble learners. The methods are studied on a benchmark data set comprising 26 disaster events and four classification problems: detection of relevant messages, informative messages, eyewitness reports, and topical classification of messages. Finally, in a case study, we evaluate the proposed methods on a real‐world data set to assess its practical value.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 43-54 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology |
Volume | 71 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 22 Mar 2019 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2020 |
Bibliographical note
© 2019 The Authors. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of ASIS&T.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.