License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2021.I.6
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-130410
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2020/13041/
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Hu, Yingjie ; Wang, Jimin

How Do People Describe Locations During a Natural Disaster: An Analysis of Tweets from Hurricane Harvey

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LIPIcs-GIScience-2021-I-6.pdf (5 MB)

Abstract

Social media platforms, such as Twitter, have been increasingly used by people during natural disasters to share information and request for help. Hurricane Harvey was a category 4 hurricane that devastated Houston, Texas, USA in August 2017 and caused catastrophic flooding in the Houston metropolitan area. Hurricane Harvey also witnessed the widespread use of social media by the general public in response to this major disaster, and geographic locations are key information pieces described in many of the social media messages. A geoparsing system, or a geoparser, can be utilized to automatically extract and locate the described locations, which can help first responders reach the people in need. While a number of geoparsers have already been developed, it is unclear how effective they are in recognizing and geo-locating the locations described by people during natural disasters. To fill this gap, this work seeks to understand how people describe locations during a natural disaster by analyzing a sample of tweets posted during Hurricane Harvey. We then identify the limitations of existing geoparsers in processing these tweets, and discuss possible approaches to overcoming these limitations.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{hu_et_al:LIPIcs:2020:13041,
  author =	{Yingjie Hu and Jimin Wang},
  title =	{{How Do People Describe Locations During a Natural Disaster: An Analysis of Tweets from Hurricane Harvey}},
  booktitle =	{11th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2021) - Part I},
  pages =	{6:1--6:16},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-166-5},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2020},
  volume =	{177},
  editor =	{Krzysztof Janowicz and Judith A. Verstegen},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2020/13041},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-130410},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2021.I.6},
  annote =	{Keywords: Geoparsing, geographic informational retrieval, social media, tweet analysis, disaster response}
}

Keywords: Geoparsing, geographic informational retrieval, social media, tweet analysis, disaster response
Collection: 11th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2021) - Part I
Issue Date: 2020
Date of publication: 25.09.2020
Supplementary Material: An annotated dataset, a full list of terms, and the constructed regular expression are available at: https://github.com/geoai-lab/HowDoPeopleDescribeLocations.

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