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Microblogging during two natural hazards events: what twitter may contribute to situational awareness

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

We analyze microblog posts generated during two recent, concurrent emergency events in North America via Twitter, a popular microblogging service. We focus on communications broadcast by people who were "on the ground" during the Oklahoma Grassfires of April 2009 and the Red River Floods that occurred in March and April 2009, and identify information that may contribute to enhancing situational awareness (SA). This work aims to inform next steps for extracting useful, relevant information during emergencies using information extraction (IE) techniques.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2010
    2690 pages
    ISBN:9781605589299
    DOI:10.1145/1753326
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 10 April 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. computer-mediated communication
    2. crisis informatics
    3. disaster
    4. emergency
    5. hazards
    6. microblogging
    7. situational awareness

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