An Embedding Based IR Model for Disaster Situations

  • Ayan Bandyopadhyay
  • Debasis Ganguly
  • Mandar Mitra
  • Sanjoy Kumar Saha
  • Gareth J.F. Jones
Article
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Abstract

Twitter (http://twitter.com) is one of the most popular social networking platforms. Twitter users can easily broadcast disaster-specific information, which, if effectively mined, can assist in relief operations. However, the brevity and informal nature of tweets pose a challenge to Information Retrieval (IR) researchers. In this paper, we successfully use word embedding techniques to improve ranking for ad-hoc queries on microblog data. Our experiments with the ‘Social Media for Emergency Relief and Preparedness’ (SMERP) dataset provided at an ECIR 2017 workshop show that these techniques outperform conventional term-matching based IR models. In addition, we show that, for the SMERP task, our word embedding based method is more effective if the embeddings are generated from the disaster specific SMERP data, than when they are trained on the large social media collection provided for the TREC (http://trec.nist.gov/) 2011 Microblog track dataset.

Keywords

Microblog Twitter Information retrieval Word embedding 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  • Ayan Bandyopadhyay
    • 1
  • Debasis Ganguly
    • 2
  • Mandar Mitra
    • 1
  • Sanjoy Kumar Saha
    • 3
  • Gareth J.F. Jones
    • 4
  1. 1.Indian Statistical InstituteKolkataIndia
  2. 2.IBM ResearchDublinIreland
  3. 3.Jadavpur UniversityKolkataIndia
  4. 4.Dublin City UniversityDublinIreland

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