Infrastructure Ombudsman: Mining Future Failure Concerns from Structural Disaster Response
This work addresses a novel problem in disaster response by mining social media for early warnings, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing research in social media analysis for structural failures.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting social media posts about anticipatory infrastructure failures to aid in prevention, and it presents a first-of-its-kind dataset of 2,662 instances from Reddit and YouTube for this task.
Current research concentrates on studying discussions on social media related to structural failures to improve disaster response strategies. However, detecting social web posts discussing concerns about anticipatory failures is under-explored. If such concerns are channeled to the appropriate authorities, it can aid in the prevention and mitigation of potential infrastructural failures. In this paper, we develop an infrastructure ombudsman -- that automatically detects specific infrastructure concerns. Our work considers several recent structural failures in the US. We present a first-of-its-kind dataset of 2,662 social web instances for this novel task mined from Reddit and YouTube.