Robust filtering of crisis-related tweets

Abstract

Social media enables fast information exchange and status reporting during crises. Filtering is usually required to identify the small fraction of social media stream data related to events. Since deep learning has recently shown to be a reliable approach for filtering and analyzing Twitter messages, a Convolutional Neural Network is examined for filtering crisis-related tweets in this work. The goal is to understand how to obtain accurate and robust filtering models and how model accuracies tend to behave in case of new events. In contrast to other works, the application to real data streams is also investigated. Motivated by the observation that machine learning model accuracies highly depend on the used data, a new comprehensive and balanced compilation of existing data sets is proposed.Experimental results with this data set provide valuable insights. Preliminary results from filtering a data stream recorded during hurricane Florence in September 2018 confirm our results.