Testing the event witnessing status of microbloggers from evidence in their micro-blogs

Abstract

This paper demonstrates a framework of processes for identifying potential witnesses of events from evidence they post to social media. The research defines original evidence models for micro-blog content sources, the relative uncertainty of different evidence types, and models for testing evidence by combination. Methods to filter and extract evidence using automated and semi-automated means are demonstrated using a Twitter case study event. Further, an implementation to test extracted evidence using Dempster Shafer Theory of Evidence are presented. The results indicate that the inclusion of evidence from microblog text and linked image content can increase the number of micro-bloggers identified at events, in comparison to the number of micro-bloggers identified from geotags alone. Additionally, the number of micro-bloggers that can be tested for evidence corroboration or conflict, is increased by incorporating evidence identified in their posting history.