A Pipeline for Rapid Post-Crisis Twitter Data Acquisition, Filtering and Visualization

Abstract

Due to instant availability of data on social media platforms like Twitter, and advances in machine learning and data management technology, real-time crisis informatics has emerged as a prolific research area in the last decade. Although several benchmarks are now available, especially on portals like CrisisLex, an important, practical problem that has not been addressed thus far is the rapid acquisition, benchmarking and visual exploration of data from free, publicly available streams like the Twitter API in the immediate aftermath of a crisis. In this paper, we present such a pipeline for facilitating immediate post-crisis data collection, curation and relevance filtering from the Twitter API. The pipeline is minimally supervised, alleviating the need for feature engineering by including a judicious mix of data preprocessing and fast text embeddings, along with an active learning framework. We illustrate the utility of the pipeline by describing a recent case study wherein it was used to collect and analyze millions of tweets in the immediate aftermath of the Las Vegas shootings in 2017.