Geographic Situational Awareness: Mining Tweets for Disaster Preparedness, Emergency Response, Impact, and Recovery

Abstract

Social media data have emerged as a new source for detecting and monitoring disaster events. A number of recent studies have suggested that social media data streams can be used to mine actionable data for emergency response and relief operation. However, no effort has been made to classify social media data into stages of disaster management (mitigation, preparedness, emergency response, and recovery), which has been used as a common reference for disaster researchers and emergency managers for decades to organize information and streamline priorities and activities during the course of a disaster. This paper makes an initial effort in coding social media messages into different themes within different disaster phases during a time-critical crisis by manually examining more than 10,000 tweets generated during a natural disaster and referencing the findings from the relevant literature and official government procedures involving different disaster stages. Moreover, a classifier based on logistic regression is trained and used for automatically mining and classifying the social media messages into various topic categories during various disaster phases. The classification results are necessary and useful for emergency managers to identify the transition between phases of disaster management, the timing of which is usually unknown and varies across disaster events, so that they can take action quickly and efficiently in the impacted communities. Information generated from the classification can also be used by the social science research communities to study various aspects of preparedness, response, impact and recovery. OPEN ACCESS

Event classification and location prediction from tweets during disasters

“…The current system adds a new dimension to social media, where it can be used as a tool for public help. Most of the prior research Huang and Xiao 2015;Carley et al 2016) on uses of social media has mainly concentrated on either evaluating the fitness of social media as a disaster management tool, or detecting tweets related to disasters to warn users about disasters. Some others researchers (Hara 2015) have studied the behavior of Twitter users during disasters.…”

Managing social media uncertainty to support the decision making process during Emergencies

“…Social Media has been used in multiple events including hurricanes, such as Sandy, Isaac, Katrina, Hugo and Rita (Belardo & Harrald, 1992;Huang & Xiao, 2015;Kapucu & Garayev, 2011;Tinker, 2013) and flooding, like in Queensland and Saxony in 2013 (Ehnis & Bunker, 2012;Peters & Paulo, 2015). However, its use is not without its considerable challenges.…”

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“…Social media messages have been separated into four categories (preparedness, response, impact, and recovery) [2] to understand the disaster event, and this framework has been done with the relevant tweet to take action quickly and efficiently in the impacted communities. Other researchers also describe the use of disaster phases (mitigation, preparedness, emergency response, and recovery) [7] which has assisted both disaster researchers and managers.…”

“…Whenever Twitter users say rain is occurring or cyclone is acting to this area, by collecting this type of tweet we can detect in which area the natural disaster is occurring. Many researchers examined the disaster-related tweet for the sake of people and relied on a four-phase categorization (preparedness, response, impact, recovery) to mitigate their sufferings [2,7]. So we think social network Twitter can be an excellent source for collecting twitter data during a natural disaster.…”