Automated emergence of a crisis situation model in crisis response based on tweets

Abstract

During a crisis, being able to understand quickly the situation on-site is crucial for the responders to take relevant decisions together. Social media, in particular Twitter, have proved to be a means for rapidly getting information from the field. However, the deluge of data is heterogeneous in many ways (location, trust, content, vocabulary, etc.), and getting a model of the crisis situation still requires laborious human actions. In addition, depending on which kind of information is mined from them, tweets have to be handle one-by-one (e.g. find victims), or as a whole - amount of tweets - (e.g. occurence of an event). This paper proposes a framework for automatically extracting, interpreting and aggregating streams of tweets to characterize crisis situations. It is based on a specific metamodel that determines the different concepts required to model a crisis situation.