Identifying Informative Messages in Disasters using Convolutional Neural Networks

Cornelia Caragea, Adrian Silvescu, Andrea H. Tapia
2016 International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management  
Social media is a vital source of information during any major event, especially natural disasters. Data produced through social networking sites is seen as ubiquitous, rapid and accessible, and it is believed to empower average citizens to become more situationally aware during disasters and coordinate to help themselves. However, with the exponential increase in the volume of social media data, so comes the increase in data that are irrelevant to a disaster, thus, diminishing peoples' ability
more » ... to find the information that they need in order to organize relief efforts, find help, and potentially save lives. In this paper, we present an approach to identifying informative messages in social media streams during disaster events. Our approach is based on Convolutional Neural Networks and shows significant improvement in performance over models that use the "bag of words" and n-grams as features on several datasets of messages from flooding events.
dblp:conf/iscram/CarageaST16 fatcat:fbcmlz4h7jhjfl3nplpf3f3un4