Rapid Classification of Crisis-Related Data on Social Networks using Convolutional Neural Networks

The role of social media, in particular microblogging platforms such as Twitter, as a conduit for actionable and tactical information during disasters is increasingly acknowledged. However, time-critical analysis of big crisis data on social media streams brings challenges to machine learning techniques, especially the ones that use supervised learning. Scarcity of labeled data, particularly in the early hours of a crisis, delays the machine learning process. The current stateof-the-art classification methods require a significant amount of labeled data specific to a particular event for training plus a lot of feature engineering to achieve best results. In this work, we introduce neural network based classification methods for binary and multi-class tweet classification task. We show that neural network based models do not require any feature engineering and perform better than state-of-theart methods. In the early hours of a disaster when no labeled data is available, our proposed method makes the best use of the out-of-event data and achieves good results. Keywords-Deep learning, Neural networks, Supervised classification, Social media, Crisis response