Good Enough is Good Enough: Overcoming Disaster Response Organizations’ Slow Social Media Data Adoption

Organizations that respond to disasters hold unreasonable standards for data arising from technology-enabled citizen contributions. This has strong negative potential for the ability of these responding organizations to incorporate these data into appropriate decision points. We argue that the landscape of the use of social media data in crisis response is varied, with pockets of use and acceptance among organizations. In this paper we present findings from interviews conducted with representatives from large international disaster response organizations concerning their use of social media data in crisis response. We found that emergency responders already operate with less than reliable, or “good enough,” information in offline practice, and that social media data are useful to responders, but only in specific crisis situations. Also, responders do use social media, but only within their known community and extended network. This shows that trust first begins with people and not data. Lastly, we demonstrate the barriers used by responding organizations have gone beyond discussions of trustworthiness and data quality to that of more operational issues.     

Optimizing social media message dissemination problem for emergency communication

Social media is increasingly being used as a communication bridge between government, emergency responders and managers, and the general public in extreme events. Passing information through social media channels enables individuals to send and receive content in real-time and without limitation of location and geography. While the use of social media in extreme event situations has become prevalent, there is often little strategy involved in message dissemination and too little understanding of the effects that underlying online social networks have on message distribution. In this study, we introduce a formal model for social media message dissemination in social networks through time. Our proposed model includes emphasis on single and multiple message scenarios and examines key communication characteristics in the development of more intentional and targeted social messaging strategies. We present a detailed experimental design on randomly generated networks and real-world sub-networks of the Twitter social graph and discuss our findings. We also include a Tabu Search procedure for solving single-message problem and discuss its potential value for large-scale problems in real-world applications.     

基于结构分析和实体识别的信息集成

针对海量的web数据，提出了一种基于文档结构分析和实体识别的web信息提取和集成方法，利用XML强大的数据描述能力，灵活组织集成的web文档信息内容．方法首先将半结构化的HTML文档转化成具有模式结构的XML文档，然后使用实体识别的技术对不同主题区域进一步抽取出格式良好的数据，最后将得到的多数据类型的信息集成到数据库中，以支持进一步的分析和查询．实验结果证明了该方法的实用和有效性．     

The dynamic role of social media during Hurricane #Sandy: An introduction of the STREMII model to weather the storm of the crisis lifecycle

Social media has introduced a key ingredient, and a potentially unfamiliar variable, into the practice of crisis communication. In this paper, the authors critically assess the social media milestones related to Hurricane Sandy according to situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) (Coombs, 2007). Further, we discuss the crisis lifecycle of Hurricane Sandy with regard to the potential implementation of the STREMII model of social media crisis management, a proposed model originated through this research application. This original model develops from lessons and best practices discovered in historical and contemporary cases of social media crises and crisis management. The researchers acknowledge potential limitations and describe steps for further development of the model through research, all the while recognizing the powerful and paradoxical role of social media in the crisis management process. In reflection of Hurricane Sandy, further qualitative and quantitative examinations of crisis events are encouraged to evaluate the STREMII model continually in the dynamic social media climate and across the vast facets of crisis communication.     

基于VxWorks平台的TIS网关设计

战术信息系统(TIS)具有集成的战术通信、导航定位和网内识别功能。由于其工作在Lx (960-1215 MHz)频段，无法完成信息的超视距实时传输，限制了其在超视距机动作战中的应用。TIS网关是实现TIS信息和指控信息的超视距实时传输的关键设备。该文构建了一个基于VxWorks实时操作系统的TIS网关，利用VxWorks丰富而标准的sockets编程接口和多任务机制，通过同步卫星为中继的数据链路，实现了TIS信息和指控信息的超视距实时传输，解决了信息的超视距实时传输问题。     

煤矿安全知识图谱构建及智能查询方法研究

煤矿企业正从信息化建设向智能化迈进,以大数据、人工智能为代表的网络新技术已促进了矿山领域的智能化发展。但是由于煤矿领域数据信息的繁杂性,难以对其进行统一而高效地收集、信息挖掘,进而促进深一步的特定领域研究和应用。将知识图谱技术初步引入煤矿安全领域,对相关知识概念分类建模,并基于图数据库存储,用实体关系图的方式直观地描述各类概念及概念之间的关系,然后基于初步构建的知识图谱,提出了一种自然语言知识查询方法。实验证明,该文提出的方法具有较高的查全率和查准率,基于Spark的并行朴素贝叶斯问题分类方法可以在保证准确率的同时,显著提升训练效率。该文工作为煤矿安全知识图谱构建及智能查询做了初步有益探索。     

基于SVM和扩展条件随机场的Web实体活动抽取

在传统信息抽取的基础上,研究Web实体活动抽取,基于格语法对实体活动进行了形式化定义,并提出一种基于SVM(supported vector machine)和扩展条件随机场的Web实体活动抽取方法,能够从Web上准确地抽取实体的活动信息.首先,为了避免人工标注训练数据的繁重工作,提出一种基于启发式规则的训练数据生成算法,将语义角色标注的训练数据集转化为适合Web实体活动抽取的训练数据集,分别训练支持向量机分类器和扩展条件随机场.在抽取过程中,通过分类器获得包含实体活动的语句,然后利用扩展条件随机场对传统条件随机场中不能利用的标签频率特征和关系特征建模,标注自然语句中的待抽取信息,提高标注的准确率.通过多领域的实验,其结果表明,所提出的抽取方法能够较好地适用于Web实体活动抽取.     

Descriptive and visual summaries of disaster events using artificial intelligence techniques: case studies of Hurricanes Harvey,Irma, and Maria

ABSTRACT

People increasingly use microblogging platforms such as Twitter during natural disasters and emergencies. Research studies have revealed the usefulness of the data available on Twitter for several disaster response tasks. However, making sense of social media data is a challenging task due to several reasons such as limitations of available tools to analyse high-volume and high-velocity data streams, dealing with information overload, among others. To eliminate such limitations, in this work, we first show that textual and imagery content on social media provide complementary information useful to improve situational awareness. We then explore ways in which various Artificial Intelligence techniques from Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision fields can exploit such complementary information generated during disaster events. Finally, we propose a methodological approach that combines several computational techniques effectively in a unified framework to help humanitarian organisations in their relief efforts. We conduct extensive experiments using textual and imagery content from millions of tweets posted during the three major disaster events in the 2017 Atlantic Hurricane season. Our study reveals that the distributions of various types of useful information can inform crisis managers and responders and facilitate the development of future automated systems for disaster management.     

Identifying Seekers and Suppliers in Social Media Communities to Support Crisis Coordination

Effective crisis management has long relied on both the formal and informal response communities. Social media platforms such as Twitter increase the participation of the informal response community in crisis response. Yet, challenges remain in realizing the formal and informal response communities as a cooperative work system. We demonstrate a supportive technology that recognizes the existing capabilities of the informal response community to identify needs (seeker behavior) and provide resources (supplier behavior), using their own terminology. To facilitate awareness and the articulation of work in the formal response community, we present a technology that can bridge the differences in terminology and understanding of the task between the formal and informal response communities. This technology includes our previous work using domain-independent features of conversation to identify indications of coordination within the informal response community. In addition, it includes a domain-dependent analysis of message content (drawing from the ontology of the formal response community and patterns of language usage concerning the transfer of property) to annotate social media messages. The resulting repository of annotated messages is accessible through our social media analysis tool, Twitris. It allows recipients in the formal response community to sort on resource needs and availability along various dimensions including geography and time. Thus, computation indexes the original social media content and enables complex querying to identify contents, players, and locations. Evaluation of the computed annotations for seeker-supplier behavior with human judgment shows fair to moderate agreement. In addition to the potential benefits to the formal emergency response community regarding awareness of the observations and activities of the informal response community, the analysis serves as a point of reference for evaluating more computationally intensive efforts and characterizing the patterns of language behavior during a crisis.     

A community-based approach to sharing knowledge before,during, and after crisis events: A case study from Thailand

This study adopts a structuration perspective to examine the knowledge sharing activities within local communities using social media to combat the 7-month 2011 Thai flood crisis using a qualitative case study. The crisis represented a unique situation wherein social media was used extensively during the most catastrophic flood crisis in Thailand. Data were collected from focus groups and in-depth interviews with flood victims, community leaders, NGOs, politicians, large enterprises, and Army leaders. The study divides the crisis event into three phases: pre-, during-, and post-crisis, treating each as both separate and interrelated, due to the changing information needs. The socialization and structuration theories were used as theoretical lenses to investigate how social media can play an important role in knowledge sharing activities in each phase of a crisis. The case study shows that social media can be adapted to fit the information and knowledge needs in each phase. This study's findings are useful and relevant for crisis managers, and clarify the potential usefulness of social media as a knowledge sharing tool during a crisis.     

Repertoires of collaboration: incorporation of social media help requests into the common operating picture

ABSTRACT

Disasters present us with dynamic and emergent multi-stakeholder scenarios. Complex decision-making is supported by Emergency Management Organisation (EMO) ‘command and control’ disaster response systems that if pushed to failure, present problems in the development and monitoring of situational awareness. Nowhere is this more evident than when the general public use social media platforms to report crisis incidents when the official emergency management hotline (e.g. Triple Zero (000) in Australia) is overwhelmed or not available. This causes a number of issues for EMO as it is difficult to verify and determine the accuracy and veracity of social media posts and how to best incorporate the information within them into situational awareness for the assessment of and response to, an emergency incident. This paper analyses interview data from five Australian EMO that outlines and discusses these issues in detail. As a result of this analysis, we suggest that developing a supplementary ‘repertoires of collaboration’ approach to incorporating social media posts into the development of situational awareness during a disaster event, would help improve disaster response outcomes. We then recommend a way forward through the application of the Negotiated Arrangements for the Common Operating Picture (COP) in Extreme Events framework.     

基于词向量语义聚类的微博热点挖掘方法

随着社交媒体的迅速发展,信息过载问题越发严重,因此如何从海量、短小而充满噪声的社交媒体数据中发现和挖掘出热点话题或者热点事件成为一个重要的问题。结合社交媒体数据实时性、地理性、包含较多元数据等特点,提出了用户行为分析与文本内容分析相结合的热点挖掘方法。在内容分析过程中,提出了从更细的词语粒度进行聚类,以代替传统的在消息粒度进行聚类的经典方法。为了提高话题关键词提取的效果,引入了基于词向量技术,并通过语义聚类的方法进行热点挖掘。在真实数据集上的实验结果表明,该方法提取的关键词语义关联性强、话题划分效果好,在主要指标上优于传统的热点挖掘方法。     

面向招投标领域的远程监督实体关系抽取研究

招投标网站资源中蕴含着丰富的情报信息。“远程监督”方法借助知识库自动标注数据,弥补了传统信息抽取方法在语料准备阶段对人工强依赖的缺陷,可有效提高信息抽取效率。该方法会引入噪声数据,导致信息抽取效果不够理想。因此,提出一种基于因子图模型的远程监督实体关系抽取方法,并结合领域特征,采用知识融合技术提高实体抽取质量,进而针对远程监督的缺陷提出基于负例数据学习的降噪方法。实验结果表明,该方法能够有效减少“噪声”干扰,提高关系抽取性能。     

Facebook and Twitter in Crisis Communication: A Comparative Study of Crisis Communication Professionals and Citizens

This mixed‐methods study presents a comparative analysis of the use and perceived usefulness of Facebook and Twitter, among Swedish citizens and crisis communication professionals, as crisis communication tools and information sources. The use and perceived usefulness of Facebook and Twitter are not congruent and consistent between the two different groups, according to the overall study. Communication professionals, for example, report higher levels of perceived usefulness regarding Facebook's potential as a crisis communication tool than do the citizens. Taken together, the results show that researchers (within social media and crisis communication) and crisis managers both need to deal with the fact that social media is not a homogenous phenomenon with a single coherent role in crisis management and communication research and practice.     

Use of Twitter in the Cameroon Anglophone crisis

ABSTRACT

A growing body of literature shows that social media plays a key role during crises and conflicts. In addition to traditional media, social media are used to mobilise people for a common cause and to communicate vital information. Very little is known about social media use during crises in the sub-Saharan African context. This article presents how Twitter is being used in the ongoing Cameroon Anglophone Crisis by several groups including the government, Anglophone activists, media organisations, and everyday citizens. Using critical theoretical perspectives to examine tweets from 1 September 2016 to 31 December 2018, this article identifies key themes. These include: placement of the crisis in a contested, historical context; debates about naming the crisis; key concepts; depiction of several forms of violence; and potential options for resolution. Social media is being used by the government, Anglophone activists, and non-affiliated people to sway public opinions on the crisis and solicit the attention of local, Diaspora, and broader international communities. Social media use has loosened the grip of governmental control of media messaging and expanded the public narratives available in Cameroon, yet at the time of the writing, this does not appear to have lessened the impact of the crisis.     

Mitigating information overload in social media during conflicts and crises: design and evaluation of a cross-platform alerting system

ABSTRACT

The research field of crisis informatics examines, amongst others, the potentials and barriers of social media use during conflicts and crises. Social media allow emergency services to reach the public easily in the context of crisis communication and receive valuable information (e.g. pictures) from social media data. However, the vast amount of data generated during large-scale incidents can lead to issues of information overload and quality. To mitigate these issues, this paper proposes the semi-automatic creation of alerts including keyword, relevance and information quality filters based on cross-platform social media data. We conducted empirical studies and workshops with emergency services across Europe to raise requirements, then iteratively designed and implemented an approach to support emergency services, and performed multiple evaluations, including live demonstrations and field trials, to research the potentials of social media-based alerts. Finally, we present the findings and implications based on semi-structured interviews with emergency services, highlighting the need for usable configurability and white-box algorithm representation.     

A Work‐In‐Process Literature Review: Incorporating Social Media in Risk and Crisis Communication

This work‐in‐process literature review gives an overview of recent insight in the incorporation of social media in risk and crisis communication. By marrying literature and examples of social media use with best practices in risk and crisis communication, this study demonstrates how communicators can embrace social media tools to better manage a risk or crisis. Best practices in risk and crisis communication are summarized, examples of social media tools used to manage risks and crises are expounded, and recommendations for practitioners are provided to incorporate social media tools in risk and crisis communication.     

Understanding the use of social media by organisations for crisis communication

Many businesses have commenced using social media for crisis communication with stakeholders. However there is little guidance in literature to assist organisational crisis managers with the selection of an appropriate crisis response strategy. Traditional theories on crisis communication may not adequately represent the social media context. This study took a qualitative approach and explored organisational use of social media for crisis communication at seventeen large Australian organisations. An analysis of 15,650 Facebook and Twitter messages was conducted, drawing on the lens of Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) (Coombs & Holladay, 2002). Findings suggested that when large Australian organisations responded to crises via social media, they lacked an awareness of the potential of social media for crisis communication. Organisations often did not respond to stakeholder messages or selected crisis response strategies that may increase reputational risk. The paper contributes important understandings of organisational social media use for crisis communication. It also assists crisis managers by providing six crisis response positions and a taxonomy of social media crisis messages that stakeholders may send to organisations. Key implications are discussed.     

Information Sharing Among Disaster Responders - An Interactive Spreadsheet-Based Collaboration Approach

Recent natural disasters have led crisis management organizations to revise their protocols so as to rely on the contribution of a wider range of actors, including simple citizens as well as expert operators, to support decision making activities. Reliable and timely information sharing among members of distributed teams of disaster responders has become paramount for the success of the overall crisis management process. In this paper we propose a crisis management system based on spreadsheet-mediated collaboration among on-site responders and decision makers. To share data a common spreadsheet artifact has been developed by using a participatory design approach which is accessed through mobile user interfaces. The evaluation results showed that the use of the spreadsheet artifact has resulted in more effective decision making relating to set of earthquake management scenarios in high-risk areas located in Italy.