Identifying Sub-events and Summarizing Disaster-Related Information from Microblogs

In recent times, humanitarian organizations increasingly rely on social media to search for information useful for disaster response. These organizations have varying information needs ranging from general situational awareness (i.e., to understand a bigger picture) to focused information needs e.g., about infrastructure damage, urgent needs of affected people. This research proposes a novel approach to help crisis responders fulfill their information needs at different levels of granularities. Specifically, the proposed approach presents simple algorithms to identify sub-events and generate summaries of big volume of messages around those events using an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) technique. Extensive evaluation on a large set of real world Twitter dataset shows (a). our algorithm can identify important sub-events with high recall (b). the summarization scheme shows (6-30%) higher accuracy of our system compared to many other state-of-the-art techniques. The simplicity of the algorithms ensures that the entire task is done in real time which is needed for practical deployment of the system.