Event relatedness assessment of Twitter messages for emergency response

Abstract

The ubiquity of smartphones and social media such as Twitter is clearly blurring traditional boundaries between producers and consumers of information. This is especially the case in emergency situations where people in the scene create and share on-the-spot information about the incident in real time. However, despite the proven importance of such platforms, finding event-related information from the real-time feeds of thousands of tweets is a significant challenge. This paper introduces a novel method for detecting event-specific and informative tweets that are likely to be beneficial for emergency response. The method investigates a sample dataset of tweets which was collected during a st..