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Towards an Interpretable Approach to Classify and Summarize Crisis Events from Microblogs

Published: 25 April 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Microblogging platforms like Twitter have been heavily leveraged to report and exchange information about natural disasters. The real-time data on these sites is highly helpful in gaining situational awareness and planning aid efforts. However, disaster-related messages are immersed in a high volume of irrelevant information. The situational data of disaster events also vary greatly in terms of information types ranging from general situational awareness (caution, infrastructure damage, casualties) to individual needs or not related to the crisis. It thus requires efficient methods to handle data overload and prioritize various types of information. This paper proposes an interpretable classification-summarization framework that first classifies tweets into different disaster-related categories and then summarizes those tweets. Unlike existing work, our classification model can provide explanations or rationales for its decisions. In the summarization phase, we employ an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) based optimization technique along with the help of rationales to generate summaries of event categories. Extensive evaluation on large-scale disaster events shows (a). our model can classify tweets into disaster-related categories with an 85% Macro F1 score and high interpretability (b). the summarizer achieves (5-25%) improvement in terms of ROUGE-1 F-score over most state-of-the-art approaches.

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cover image ACM Conferences
WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
April 2022
3764 pages
ISBN:9781450390965
DOI:10.1145/3485447
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 25 April 2022

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Author Tags

  1. Classification
  2. Crisis Events
  3. Interpretability
  4. Summarization

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Funding Sources

  • DFG Grant - ManagedForgetting
  • European Union?s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program - MIRROR

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WWW '22
Sponsor:
WWW '22: The ACM Web Conference 2022
April 25 - 29, 2022
Virtual Event, Lyon, France

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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  • (2025)ATSumm: Auxiliary information enhanced approach for abstractive disaster tweet summarization with sparse training dataKnowledge-Based Systems10.1016/j.knosys.2025.112969311(112969)Online publication date: Feb-2025
  • (2024)Infrastructure Ombudsman: Mining Future Failure Concerns from Structural Disaster ResponseProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3648153(4664-4673)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
  • (2024)Human vs ChatGPT: Effect of Data Annotation in Interpretable Crisis-Related Microblog ClassificationProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3648141(4534-4543)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
  • (2024)A Trustworthy Approach to Classify and Analyze Epidemic-Related Information From MicroblogsIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2024.339139511:5(6229-6241)Online publication date: Oct-2024
  • (2024)OntoDSumm: Ontology-Based Tweet Summarization for Disaster EventsIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2023.326602511:2(2724-2739)Online publication date: Apr-2024
  • (2024)IKDSummComputer Speech and Language10.1016/j.csl.2024.10164987:COnline publication date: 1-Aug-2024
  • (2024)ADSumm: annotated ground-truth summary datasets for disaster tweet summarizationSocial Network Analysis and Mining10.1007/s13278-024-01323-914:1Online publication date: 5-Aug-2024
  • (2023)Towards Automated Situational Awareness Reporting for Disaster Management—A Case StudySustainability10.3390/su1510796815:10(7968)Online publication date: 13-May-2023
  • (2023)CollabEquality: A Crowd-AI Collaborative Learning Framework to Address Class-wise Inequality in Web-based Disaster ResponseProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202310.1145/3543507.3583871(4050-4059)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
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