Twitter Speaks: A Case of National Disaster Situational Awareness
This work addresses disaster management for emergency responders and policymakers by providing a more efficient alternative to traditional surveys, though it is incremental as it applies existing text mining methods to a new domain.
The authors tackled the problem of situational awareness during natural disasters by proposing the Twitter Situational Awareness (TwiSA) framework, which uses text mining methods like sentiment analysis and topic modeling on social media data, and they demonstrated its effectiveness by tracking negative concerns during the 2015 South Carolina flood.
In recent years, we have been faced with a series of natural disasters causing a tremendous amount of financial, environmental, and human losses. The unpredictable nature of natural disasters' behavior makes it hard to have a comprehensive situational awareness (SA) to support disaster management. Using opinion surveys is a traditional approach to analyze public concerns during natural disasters; however, this approach is limited, expensive, and time-consuming. Luckily the advent of social media has provided scholars with an alternative means of analyzing public concerns. Social media enable users (people) to freely communicate their opinions and disperse information regarding current events including natural disasters. This research emphasizes the value of social media analysis and proposes an analytical framework: Twitter Situational Awareness (TwiSA). This framework uses text mining methods including sentiment analysis and topic modeling to create a better SA for disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. TwiSA has also effectively deployed on a large number of tweets and tracks the negative concerns of people during the 2015 South Carolina flood.