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Published in: Information Systems Frontiers 5/2018

22-03-2018

CrisMap: a Big Data Crisis Mapping System Based on Damage Detection and Geoparsing

Authors: Marco Avvenuti, Stefano Cresci, Fabio Del Vigna, Tiziano Fagni, Maurizio Tesconi

Published in: Information Systems Frontiers | Issue 5/2018

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Abstract

Natural disasters, as well as human-made disasters, can have a deep impact on wide geographic areas, and emergency responders can benefit from the early estimation of emergency consequences. This work presents CrisMap, a Big Data crisis mapping system capable of quickly collecting and analyzing social media data. CrisMap extracts potential crisis-related actionable information from tweets by adopting a classification technique based on word embeddings and by exploiting a combination of readily-available semantic annotators to geoparse tweets. The enriched tweets are then visualized in customizable, Web-based dashboards, also leveraging ad-hoc quantitative visualizations like choropleth maps. The maps produced by our system help to estimate the impact of the emergency in its early phases, to identify areas that have been severely struck, and to acquire a greater situational awareness. We extensively benchmark the performance of our system on two Italian natural disasters by validating our maps against authoritative data. Finally, we perform a qualitative case-study on a recent devastating earthquake occurred in Central Italy.

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Footnotes
16
See Section 5 for more details about the proposed approach.
 
28
As software implementation we used the SVC class available in the scikit-learn Python package.
 
29
The meaning of this hypothesis is that words appearing in similar contexts often have a similar meaning.
 
30
We did not use more sophisticated methods like “Paragraph Vector” (Le and Mikolov 2014) because these statistical methods do not work well for small texts like tweets.
 
31
We used the ’balanced’ value for class weight, see scikit-learn documentation at http://​bit.​ly/​2g5QSqk. In this way we indicate to SVM to treat the various labels in different ways during the training phase, giving more importance to class errors (measured with used loss function) made for skewed classes.
 
32
In case of configurations with equal results in terms of F1 we prefer to choose those having more balanced values between precision and recall measures.
 
36
http://​www.​regione.​sardegna.​it/​documenti/​1_​231_​20140403083152.​pdf - Italian Civil Protection report on damage to private properties, public infrastructures, and production facilities.
 
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Metadata
Title
CrisMap: a Big Data Crisis Mapping System Based on Damage Detection and Geoparsing
Authors
Marco Avvenuti
Stefano Cresci
Fabio Del Vigna
Tiziano Fagni
Maurizio Tesconi
Publication date
22-03-2018
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Information Systems Frontiers / Issue 5/2018
Print ISSN: 1387-3326
Electronic ISSN: 1572-9419
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-018-9833-z

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