A Classification Model for the Identification of Prominent Microblogs Users during a Disaster

Imen Bizid (1) , Patrice Boursier (1) , Jacques Morcos (1) , Sami Faiz (2)

1 L3I - Laboratoire Informatique, Image et Interaction - EA 2118
2 UMA - Université de la Manouba [Tunisie]

Content shared in microblogs during disasters is expressed in various formats and languages. This diversity makes the information retrieval process more complex and computationally infeasible in real time. To address this, we propose a classification model for the identification of prominent users who are sharing relevant and exclusive information during the disaster. Users who have shared at least one tweet about the disaster are modeled using three kinds of time-sensitive features, including topical, social and geographical features. Then, these users are classified into two classes using a linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) to evaluate them over the extracted features and identify the most prominent ones. The first results using the actual dataset, show that our model has a high accuracy by detecting most of the prominent users. Moreover, we demonstrate that all the proposed features used by our model are indispensable to achieve this high accuracy.

Mots clés: Disaster management; Information retrieval; Microblogs

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Réseaux sociaux et d'information [cs.SI]; Recherche d'information [cs.IR]

Imen Bizid, Patrice Boursier, Jacques Morcos, Sami Faiz. A Classification Model for the Identification of Prominent Microblogs Users during a Disaster. The 12th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, May 2015, Kristiansand, Norway. pp.3-8. ⟨hal-01287164⟩