Twitter as a Lifeline: Human-annotated Twitter Corpora for NLP of Crisis-related Messages

Muhammad Imran, Prasenjit Mitra, Carlos Castillo


Abstract
Microblogging platforms such as Twitter provide active communication channels during mass convergence and emergency events such as earthquakes, typhoons. During the sudden onset of a crisis situation, affected people post useful information on Twitter that can be used for situational awareness and other humanitarian disaster response efforts, if processed timely and effectively. Processing social media information pose multiple challenges such as parsing noisy, brief and informal messages, learning information categories from the incoming stream of messages and classifying them into different classes among others. One of the basic necessities of many of these tasks is the availability of data, in particular human-annotated data. In this paper, we present human-annotated Twitter corpora collected during 19 different crises that took place between 2013 and 2015. To demonstrate the utility of the annotations, we train machine learning classifiers. Moreover, we publish first largest word2vec word embeddings trained on 52 million crisis-related tweets. To deal with tweets language issues, we present human-annotated normalized lexical resources for different lexical variations.
Anthology ID:
L16-1259
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1638–1643
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1259
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Muhammad Imran, Prasenjit Mitra, and Carlos Castillo. 2016. Twitter as a Lifeline: Human-annotated Twitter Corpora for NLP of Crisis-related Messages. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 1638–1643, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Twitter as a Lifeline: Human-annotated Twitter Corpora for NLP of Crisis-related Messages (Imran et al., LREC 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1259.pdf