Domain Adaptation for Arabic Crisis Response

Reem Alrashdi, Simon O’Keefe


Abstract
Deep learning algorithms can identify related tweets to reduce the information overload that prevents humanitarian organisations from using valuable Twitter posts. However, they rely heavily on human-labelled data, which are unavailable for emerging crises. Because each crisis has its own features, such as location, time and social media response, current models are known to suffer from generalising to unseen disaster events when pre-trained on past ones. Tweet classifiers for low-resource languages like Arabic has the additional issue of limited labelled data duplicates caused by the absence of good language resources. Thus, we propose a novel domain adaptation approach that employs distant supervision to automatically label tweets from emerging Arabic crisis events to be used to train a model along with available human-labelled data. We evaluate our work on data from seven 2018–2020 Arabic events from different crisis types (flood, explosion, virus and storm). Results show that our method outperforms self-training in identifying crisis-related tweets in real-time scenarios and can be seen as a robust Arabic tweet classifier.
Anthology ID:
2022.wanlp-1.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Hend Al-Khalifa, Kareem Darwish, Owen Rambow, Fethi Bougares, Ahmed Abdelali, Nadi Tomeh, Salam Khalifa, Wajdi Zaghouani
Venue:
WANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
249–259
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wanlp-1.23
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.wanlp-1.23
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Reem Alrashdi and Simon O’Keefe. 2022. Domain Adaptation for Arabic Crisis Response. In Proceedings of the Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP), pages 249–259, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Domain Adaptation for Arabic Crisis Response (Alrashdi & O’Keefe, WANLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.wanlp-1.23.pdf