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The objective of this paper is to propose and test a system analytics framework based on social sensing and text mining to detect topic evolution associated with the performance of infrastructure systems in disasters. Social media, like Twitter, as active channels of communication and information dissemination, provide insights into real-time information and first-hand experience from affected areas in mass emergencies. While the existing studies show the importance of social sensing in improving situational awareness and emergency response in disasters, the use of social sensing for detection and analysis of infrastructure systems and their resilience performance has been rather limited. This limitation is due to the lack of frameworks to model the events and topics (e.g., grid interruption and road closure) evolution associated with infrastructure systems (e.g., power, highway, airport, and oil) in times of disasters. The proposed framework detects infrastructure-related topics of the tweets posted in disasters and their evolutions by integrating searching relevant keywords, text lemmatization, Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging, TF-IDF vectorization, topic modeling by using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), and K-Means clustering. The application of the proposed framework was demonstrated in a study of infrastructure systems in Houston during Hurricane Harvey. In this case study, more than sixty thousand tweets were retrieved from 150-mile radius in Houston over 39 days. The analysis of topic detection and evolution from user-generated data were conducted, and the clusters of tweets pertaining to certain topics were mapped in networks over time. The results show that the proposed framework enables to summarize topics and track the movement of situations in different disaster phases. The analytics elements of the proposed framework can improve the recognition of infrastructure performance through text-based representation and provide evidence for decision-makers to take actionable measurements.
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A graph‐based method for social sensing of infrastructure disruptions in disasters
Abstract Damages in critical infrastructure occur abruptly, and disruptions evolve with time dynamically. Understanding the situation of critical infrastructure disruptions is essential to effective disaster response and recovery of communities. Although the potential of social media data for situation awareness during disasters has been investigated in recent studies, the application of social sensing in detecting disruptions and analyzing evolutions of the situation about critical infrastructure is limited. To address this limitation, this study developed a graph‐based method for detecting credible situation information related to infrastructure disruptions in disasters. The proposed method was composed of data filtering, burst time‐frame detection, content similarity calculation, graph analysis, and situation evolution analysis. The application of the proposed method was demonstrated in a case study of Hurricane Harvey in 2017 in Houston. The findings highlighted the capability of the proposed method in detecting credible situational information and capturing the temporal and spatial patterns of critical infrastructure events that occurred in Harvey, including disruptive events and their adverse impacts on communities. The proposed methodology can improve the ability of community members, volunteer responders, and decision makers to detect and respond to infrastructure disruptions in disasters.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1759537
- PAR ID:
- 10102210
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering
- Volume:
- 34
- Issue:
- 12
- ISSN:
- 1093-9687
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 1055-1070
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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