Jennings Anderson


2018

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Improving Classification of Twitter Behavior During Hurricane Events
Kevin Stowe | Jennings Anderson | Martha Palmer | Leysia Palen | Ken Anderson
Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media

A large amount of social media data is generated during natural disasters, and identifying the relevant portions of this data is critical for researchers attempting to understand human behavior, the effects of information sources, and preparatory actions undertaken during these events. In order to classify human behavior during hazard events, we employ machine learning for two tasks: identifying hurricane related tweets and classifying user evacuation behavior during hurricanes. We show that feature-based and deep learning methods provide different benefits for tweet classification, and ensemble-based methods using linguistic, temporal, and geospatial features can effectively classify user behavior.

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Developing and Evaluating Annotation Procedures for Twitter Data during Hazard Events
Kevin Stowe | Martha Palmer | Jennings Anderson | Marina Kogan | Leysia Palen | Kenneth M. Anderson | Rebecca Morss | Julie Demuth | Heather Lazrus
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Linguistic Annotation, Multiword Expressions and Constructions (LAW-MWE-CxG-2018)

When a hazard such as a hurricane threatens, people are forced to make a wide variety of decisions, and the information they receive and produce can influence their own and others’ actions. As social media grows more popular, an increasing number of people are using social media platforms to obtain and share information about approaching threats and discuss their interpretations of the threat and their protective decisions. This work aims to improve understanding of natural disasters through social media and provide an annotation scheme to identify themes in user’s social media behavior and facilitate efforts in supervised machine learning. To that end, this work has three contributions: (1) the creation of an annotation scheme to consistently identify hazard-related themes in Twitter, (2) an overview of agreement rates and difficulties in identifying annotation categories, and (3) a public release of both the dataset and guidelines developed from this scheme.