Understanding eyewitness reports on twitter during disasters

Kiran Zahra, Muhammad Imran, Frank O. Ostermann

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

20 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Social media platforms such as Twitter provide convenient ways to share and consume important information during disasters and emergencies. Information from bystanders and eyewitnesses can be useful for law enforcement agencies and humanitarian organizations to get firsthand and credible information about an ongoing situation to gain situational awareness among other uses. However, identification of eyewitness reports on Twitter is challenging for many reasons. This work investigates the sources of tweets and classifies them into three types (i) direct eyewitnesses, (ii) indirect eyewitness, and (iii) vulnerable accounts. Moreover, we investigate various characteristics associated with each kind of eyewitness account. We observe that words related to perceptual senses (feeling, seeing, hearing) tend to be present in direct eyewitness messages, whereas emotions, thoughts, and prayers are more common in indirect witnesses. We believe these characteristics can help make more e cient computational methods and systems in the future for automatic identification of eyewitness accounts.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationConference Proceedings - 15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM 2018
EditorsBrian Tomaszewski, Kees Boersma
PublisherInformation Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM
Pages687-695
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9780692127605
Publication statusPublished - 2018
Event15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM 2018 - Rochester, United States
Duration: 20 May 201823 May 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International ISCRAM Conference
Volume2018-May
ISSN (Electronic)2411-3387

Conference

Conference15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityRochester
Period20/05/1823/05/18

Keywords

  • Disaster response
  • Eyewitness accounts
  • Social media

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