Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lamsal, Rabindra, Read, Maria Rodriguez, Karunasekera, Shanika, Imran, Muhammad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.11897
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916375185850368
author Lamsal, Rabindra
Read, Maria Rodriguez
Karunasekera, Shanika
Imran, Muhammad
author_facet Lamsal, Rabindra
Read, Maria Rodriguez
Karunasekera, Shanika
Imran, Muhammad
contents During times of crisis, social media platforms play a crucial role in facilitating communication and coordinating resources. In the midst of chaos and uncertainty, communities often rely on these platforms to share urgent pleas for help, extend support, and organize relief efforts. However, the overwhelming volume of conversations during such periods can escalate to unprecedented levels, necessitating the automated identification and matching of requests and offers to streamline relief operations. Additionally, there is a notable absence of studies conducted in multi-lingual settings, despite the fact that any geographical area can have a diverse linguistic population. Therefore, we propose CReMa (Crisis Response Matcher), a systematic approach that integrates textual, temporal, and spatial features to address the challenges of effectively identifying and matching requests and offers on social media platforms during emergencies. Our approach utilizes a crisis-specific pre-trained model and a multi-lingual embedding space. We emulate human decision-making to compute temporal and spatial features and non-linearly weigh the textual features. The results from our experiments are promising, outperforming strong baselines. Additionally, we introduce a novel multi-lingual dataset simulating help-seeking and offering assistance on social media in 16 languages and conduct comprehensive cross-lingual experiments. Furthermore, we analyze a million-scale geotagged global dataset to understand patterns in seeking help and offering assistance on social media. Overall, these contributions advance the field of crisis informatics and provide benchmarks for future research in the area.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_11897
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CReMa: Crisis Response through Computational Identification and Matching of Cross-Lingual Requests and Offers Shared on Social Media
Lamsal, Rabindra
Read, Maria Rodriguez
Karunasekera, Shanika
Imran, Muhammad
Computation and Language
During times of crisis, social media platforms play a crucial role in facilitating communication and coordinating resources. In the midst of chaos and uncertainty, communities often rely on these platforms to share urgent pleas for help, extend support, and organize relief efforts. However, the overwhelming volume of conversations during such periods can escalate to unprecedented levels, necessitating the automated identification and matching of requests and offers to streamline relief operations. Additionally, there is a notable absence of studies conducted in multi-lingual settings, despite the fact that any geographical area can have a diverse linguistic population. Therefore, we propose CReMa (Crisis Response Matcher), a systematic approach that integrates textual, temporal, and spatial features to address the challenges of effectively identifying and matching requests and offers on social media platforms during emergencies. Our approach utilizes a crisis-specific pre-trained model and a multi-lingual embedding space. We emulate human decision-making to compute temporal and spatial features and non-linearly weigh the textual features. The results from our experiments are promising, outperforming strong baselines. Additionally, we introduce a novel multi-lingual dataset simulating help-seeking and offering assistance on social media in 16 languages and conduct comprehensive cross-lingual experiments. Furthermore, we analyze a million-scale geotagged global dataset to understand patterns in seeking help and offering assistance on social media. Overall, these contributions advance the field of crisis informatics and provide benchmarks for future research in the area.
title CReMa: Crisis Response through Computational Identification and Matching of Cross-Lingual Requests and Offers Shared on Social Media
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.11897