Autonomous Eyewitness Identification by Employing Linguistic Rules forDisaster Events

Social networking platforms provide a vital source for disseminating information across the globe,particularly in case of disaster.These platforms are great mean to find out the real account of the disaster.Twitter is an example of such platform,which has been extensively utilized by scientific community due to its unidirectional model.It is considered a challenging task to identify eyewitness tweets about the incident from the millions of tweets shared by twitter users.Research community has proposed diverse sets of techniques to identify eyewitness account.A recent state-of-the-art approach has proposed a comprehensive set of features to identify eyewitness account.However,this approach suffers some limitation.Firstly,automatically extracting the feature-words remains a perplexing task against each feature identified by the approach.Secondly,all identified features were not incorporated in the implementation.This paper has utilized the language structure,linguistics,and word relation to achieve automatic extraction of feature-words by creating grammar rules.Additionally,all identified features were implemented which were left out by the state-of-the-art model.A generic approach is taken to cover different types of disaster such as earthquakes,floods,hurricanes,and wildfires.The proposed approach was then evaluated for all disaster-types,including earthquakes,floods,hurricanes,and fire.Based on the static dictionary,the Zahra et al.approach was able to produce an F-Score value of 0.92 for Eyewitness identification in the earthquake category.The proposed approach secured F-Score values of 0.81 in the same category.This score can be considered as a significant score without using a static dictionary.

Automatic Eyewitness Identification During Disasters by Forming a Feature-Word Dictionary

Social media provide digitally interactional technologies to facilitate information sharing and exchanging individuals.Precisely,in case of disasters,a massive corpus is placed on platforms such as Twitter.Eyewitness accounts can benefit humanitarian organizations and agencies,but identifying the eyewitness Tweets related to the disaster from millions of Tweets is difficult.Different approaches have been developed to address this kind of problem.The recent state-of-the-art system was based on a manually created dictionary and this approach was further refined by introducing linguistic rules.However,these approaches suffer from limitations as they are dataset-dependent and not scalable.In this paper,we proposed a method to identify eyewitnesses from Twitter.To experiment,we utilized 13 features discovered by the pioneer of this domain and can classify the tweets to determine the eyewitness.Considering each feature,a dictionary of words was created with the Word Dictionary Maker algorithm,which is the crucial contribution of this research.This algorithm inputs some terms relevant to a specific feature for its initialization and then creates the words dictionary.Further,keyword matching for each feature in tweets is performed.If a feature exists in a tweet,it is termed as 1;otherwise,0.Similarly,for 13 features,we created a file that reflects features in each tweet.To classify the tweets based on features,Naïve Bayes,Random Forest,and Neural Network were utilized.The approach was implemented on different disasters like earthquakes,floods,hurricanes,and Forest fires.The results were compared with the state-of-the-art linguistic rule-based system with 0.81 F-measure values.At the same time,the proposed approach gained a 0.88 value of F-measure.The results were comparable as the proposed approach is not dataset-dependent.Therefore,it can be used for the identification of eyewitness accounts.