Community Question Answering has emerged as a popular and effective paradigm for a wide range of information needs. For example, to find out an obscure piece of trivia, it is now possible and even very effective to post a question on a popular community QA site such as Yahoo! Answers, and to rely on other users to provide answers, often within minutes. The importance of such community QA sites is magnified as they create archives of millions of questions and hundreds of millions of answers, many of which are invaluable for the information needs of other searchers. However, to make this immense body of knowledge accessible, effective answer retrieval is required. In particular, as any user can contribute an answer to a question, the majority of the content reflects personal, often unsubstantiated opinions. A ranking that combines both relevance and quality is required to make such archives usable for factual information retrieval. This task is challenging, as the structure and the contents of community QA archives differ significantly from the web setting. To address this problem we present a general ranking framework for factual information retrieval from social media. Results of a large scale evaluation demonstrate that our method is highly effective at retrieving well-formed, factual answers to questions, as evaluated on a standard factoid QA benchmark. We also show that our learning framework can be tuned with the minimum of manual labeling. Finally, we provide result analysis to gain deeper understanding of which features are significant for social media search and retrieval. Our system can be used as a crucial building block for combining results from a variety of social media content with general web search results, and to better integrate social media content for effective information access.

Effective crisis management has long relied on both the formal and informal response communities. Social media platforms such as Twitter increase the participation of the informal response community in crisis response. Yet, challenges remain in realizing the formal and informal response communities as a cooperative work system. We demonstrate a supportive technology that recognizes the existing capabilities of the informal response community to identify needs (seeker behavior) and provide resources (supplier behavior), using their own terminology. To facilitate awareness and the articulation of work in the formal response community, we present a technology that can bridge the differences in terminology and understanding of the task between the formal and informal response communities. This technology includes our previous work using domain-independent features of conversation to identify indications of coordination within the informal response community. In addition, it includes a domain-dependent analysis of message content (drawing from the ontology of the formal response community and patterns of language usage concerning the transfer of property) to annotate social media messages. The resulting repository of annotated messages is accessible through our social media analysis tool, Twitris. It allows recipients in the formal response community to sort on resource needs and availability along various dimensions including geography and time. Thus, computation indexes the original social media content and enables complex querying to identify contents, players, and locations. Evaluation of the computed annotations for seeker-supplier behavior with human judgment shows fair to moderate agreement. In addition to the potential benefits to the formal emergency response community regarding awareness of the observations and activities of the informal response community, the analysis serves as a point of reference for evaluating more computationally intensive efforts and characterizing the patterns of language behavior during a crisis.

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Abstract-Social media platforms facilitate the emergence of citizen communities that discuss real-world events. Their content reflects a variety of intent ranging from social good (e.g., volunteering to help) to commercial interest (e.g., criticizing product features). Hence, mining intent from social data can aid in filtering social media to support organizations, such as an emergency management unit for resource planning. However, effective intent mining is inherently challenging due to ambiguity in interpretation, and sparsity of relevant behaviors in social data. In this paper, we address the problem of multiclass classification of intent with a use-case of social data generated during crisis events. Our novel method exploits a hybrid feature representation created by combining top-down processing using knowledge-guided patterns with bottom-up processing using a bag-of-tokens model. We employ pattern-set creation from a variety of knowledge sources including psycholinguistics to tackle the ambiguity challenge, social behavior about conversations to enrich context, and contrast patterns to tackle the sparsity challenge. Our results show a significant absolute gain up to 7% in the F1 score relative to a baseline using bottom-up processing alone, within the popular multiclass frameworks of One-vs-One and One-vs-All. Intent mining can help design efficient cooperative information systems between citizens and organizations for serving organizational information needs.

The public expects a prompt response from emergency services to address requests for help posted on social media. However, the information overload of social media experienced by these organizations, coupled with their limited human resources, challenges them to timely identify and prioritize critical requests. This is particularly acute in crisis situations where any delay may have a severe impact on the effectiveness of the response. While social media has been extensively studied during crises, there is limited work on formally characterizing serviceable help requests and automatically prioritizing them for a timely response. In this paper, we present a formal model of serviceability called Social-EOC (Social Emergency Operations Center), which describes the elements of a serviceable message posted in social media that can be expressed as a request. We also describe a system for the discovery and ranking of highly serviceable requests, based on the proposed serviceability model. We validate the model for emergency services, by performing an evaluation based on real-world data from six crises, with ground truth provided by emergency management practitioners. Our experiments demonstrate that features based on the serviceability model improve the performance of discovering and ranking (nDCG up to 25%) service requests over different baselines. In the light of these experiments, the application of the serviceability model could reduce the cognitive load on emergency operation center personnel, in filtering and ranking public requests at scale.