6533b7d7fe1ef96bd1268294

RESEARCH PRODUCT

An Iterative Information Retrieval Approach from Social Media in Crisis Situations

subject

description

During to past few years, social media have gained a pivotal role in crisis communication. Its usage has ranged from informing the public about the status of a crisis and what precaution need to be taken, to family members checking on the safety of loved ones. Despite the widespread use of social media in crises situations and the clear potential benefit from collecting potential critical information from social media, emergency management services (EMSs) are still reluctant to use social media as a source of information to improve their situational awareness. One of the reasons for the reluctance is that crises management are typically overloaded with information. Adding social media will only increase the information overload, and the EMSs risk being provided with more and possibly irrelevant information from social media sources. Furthermore, most automated social media analysis platforms are designed exclusively to classifying messages into crisis and not crisis-related categories. The platforms do not take into account the degree of relevance of social media information to the EMSs. Such relevance further depends on the crisis' status at a certain point in time, and the information gathered up to that point. This paper proposes an intelligent information retrieval framework from social media during crises. The developed framework combines two components: The first component classifies social media messages into separate topics representing the information needed in different situations. The second component decides which information to retrieve based on the information available and the status of the crisis. The framework is evaluated through a survey of EMSs. They agree with the framework in 70.85% of the cases about what information is needed.