Twitter Mining for Disaster Response: A Domain Adaptation Approach

Microblogging data such as Twitter data contains valuable information that has the potential to help improve the speed, quality, and efficiency of disaster response. Machine learning can help with this by prioritizing the tweets with respect to various classification criteria. However, supervised learning algorithms require labeled data to learn accurate classifiers. Unfortunately, for a new disaster, labeled tweets are not easily available, while they are usually available for previous disasters. Furthermore, unlabeled tweets from the current disaster are accumulating fast. We study the usefulness of labeled data from a prior source disaster, together with unlabeled data from the current target disaster to learn domain adaptation classifiers for the target. Experimental results suggest that, for some tasks, source data itself can be useful for classifying target data. However, for tasks specific to a particular disaster, domain adaptation approaches that use target unlabeled data in addition to source labeled data are superior.