UCD-CS at TREC 2021 Incident Streams Track
This work addresses the challenge of extracting critical information from social media during crises to assist emergency responders, representing an incremental improvement in a domain-specific task.
The paper tackled the problem of classifying and prioritizing crisis-related tweets for emergency response, achieving the highest scores in many official evaluation metrics in the TREC Incident Streams 2021 track.
In recent years, the task of mining important information from social media posts during crises has become a focus of research for the purposes of assisting emergency response (ES). The TREC Incident Streams (IS) track is a research challenge organised for this purpose. The track asks participating systems to both classify a stream of crisis-related tweets into humanitarian aid related information types and estimate their importance regarding criticality. The former refers to a multi-label information type classification task and the latter refers to a priority estimation task. In this paper, we report on the participation of the University College Dublin School of Computer Science (UCD-CS) in TREC-IS 2021. We explored a variety of approaches, including simple machine learning algorithms, multi-task learning techniques, text augmentation, and ensemble approaches. The official evaluation results indicate that our runs achieve the highest scores in many metrics. To aid reproducibility, our code is publicly available at https://github.com/wangcongcong123/crisis-mtl.