Enable tweet-geolocation and don’t drive ERTs crazy! Improving situational awareness using Twitter

1. Enable tweet-geolocation and don’t drive ERTs crazy!
Improving situational awareness using Twitter
Juan Sixto, Oscar Peña, Bernhard Klein and Diego López-de-Ipiña
DeustoTech−Deusto Institute of Technology, University of Deusto
SMERST 2013. University of Warwick, Coventry UK

2. Outline
● Motivations
● Why Twitter ?
● Extracting Relevant Information
● Location Problems
● Noise Reduction
● Disambiguation
● Proposed Solutions
● Results
● Conclusions and Future Work
http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnavy/8154906115/

3. Motivations
● SABESS Project
● Social Networks provide high
availability compared to traditional
communication services.
● People usually tend to post more
often than alerting ERTs.
● Easy to automate the incoming
data (programmatic analysis)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wiertz/8553028974

4. Why Twitter ?
Advantages
● Very popular communication tool
(>175M/day tweets and 200M users)
● De-facto tool for broadcasting news
● Real-time information
Drawbacks
● Short posts (140 characters max)
● Much noise in the Twitterverse
http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnavy/8154906115/

5. Extracting relevant information
● What?
● Incidents filtered by
keywords + context
● Where?
● User profile's location
● Geo-tagged tweets
● NER System
(Named Entity Recognition)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosauraochoa/3283888598/

6. Location Problems
● Ungeotagged
tweets & users
● Noise
● Ambiguity
http://www.flickr.com/photos/scottod/5653885470/

7. Noise Reduction
● Slang Cleaner
● Stop Words
● Hashtags
● URLs
● Mentions
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rarebeasts/4468517649/

8. Noise Reduction
● Slang Cleaner
● Stop Words
● Hashtags
● URLs
Oh My God, being woken up to a car on #fire
right outside my window, only in #Springfield!.
ttp://bitly.com/16KWmdM
● Mentions
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rarebeasts/4468517649/

9. Noise Reduction
Oh My God, being woken up to a car on #fire
right outside my window, only in #Springfield!.
http://bitly.com/16KWmdM
● Slang Cleaner
God, woken car #fire window, #Springfield!.
http://bitly.com/16KWmdM ● Stop Words
● Hashtags
God, woken car fire window, Springfield!. ● URLs
http://bitly.com/16KWmdM
● Mentions
God, woken car fire window, Springfield!.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rarebeasts/4468517649/

10. Noise Reduction
God, woken car fire window, Springfield!.
● Slang Cleaner
● Stop Words
NER Analyser
● Hashtags
● URLs
● Mentions
Springfield [LOCATION].
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rarebeasts/4468517649/

11. Noise Reduction Results
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rarebeasts/4468517649/

12. Disambiguation
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dougtone/5180424902/

13. Proposed Solutions
● Geolocalization APIs
● Nominatim (OSM)
● Geonames
● Google Reverse
Coder
● Yahoo Geoplanet
http://www.flickr.com/photos/leehaywood/5047795870/

14. Proposed Solutions Demo
http://www.flickr.com/photos/leehaywood/5047795870/

15. Results
● NER Tool
Comparison
● Geo-location API
Comparison
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosasay/4675053765/

16. Conclusions and Future Work
● Other Social Networks
● Improve Conversation
Graphs
● Increase Accuracy
http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnavy/8612336419

17. References
F. Abel, C. Hauff, G. J. Houben, R. Stronkman, and K. Tao. Semantics+ filtering+ search=
twitcident. exploring information in social web streams. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM conference
on Hypertext and social media, pages 285–294, 2012.
S. Paradesi. Geotagging tweets using their content. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Interna-
tional Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference, 2011.
Jie Yin, A. Lampert, M. Cameron, B. Robinson, and R. Power. Using social media to enhance
emergency situation awareness. Intelligent Systems, IEEE, 27(6):52–59, December 2012.
A. Ritter, S. Clark, and O. Etzioni. Named entity recognition in tweets: an experimental study.
In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages
1524–1534, 2011.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnavy/8612336419

18. Enable tweet-geolocation and don’t drive ERTs crazy!
Improving situational awareness using Twitter
Juan Sixto Cesteros
jsixto@deusto.es
@JuanSixtoC
Juan Sixto, Oscar Peña, Bernhard Klein and Diego López-de-Ipiña
DeustoTech−Deusto Institute of Technology, University of Deusto
SMERST 2013. University of Warwick, Coventry UK

19. Enable tweet-geolocation and don’t drive ERTs crazy!
Improving situational awareness using Twitter
All rights of images are reserved by the original owners*,
the rest of the content is licensed under a
Creative Commons by-sa 3.0 license.
*See references in each slide