Crisis Tweets: Natural Language Processing to the Rescue?
My colleagues at the University of Colorado, Boulder, have been doing some very interesting applied research on automatically extracting “situational awareness” from tweets generated during crises. As is increasingly recognized by many in the humanitarian space, Twitter can at times be an important source of relevant information. The challenge is to make sense of a potentially massive number of crisis tweets in near real-time to turn this information into situational awareness.
Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML), Colorado colleagues have developed a “suite of classifiers to differentiate tweets across several dimensions: subjectivity, personal or impersonal style, and linguistic register (formal or informal style).” They suggest that tweets contributing to situational awareness are likely to be “written in a style that is objective, impersonal, and formal; therefore, the identification of subjectivity, personal style and formal register could provide useful features for extracting tweets that contain tactical information.” To explore this hypothesis, they studied the follow four crisis events: the North American Red River floods of 2009 and 2010, the 2009 Oklahoma grassfires, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
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Phi Beta Iota: Humans will continue to outpace computers for the indefinite future. Artificial Intelligence, of which Natural Language Processing is a sub-set, never fulfilled the expectations created for it, and to date all forms of proprietary technology remains retarded in relation to scalability, extendability, sustainabiliy, affordability, and agility.
See Also:
2012 PREPRINT FOR COMMENT: The Craft of Intelligence
2010 INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability
