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Climate change has led to a variety of disasters that have caused damage to infrastructure and the economy with societal impacts to human living. Understanding people’s emotions and stressors during disaster times will enable preparation strategies for mitigating further consequences. In this paper, we mine emotions and stressors encountered by people and shared on Twitter during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 as a showcase. In this work, we acquired a dataset of tweets from Twitter on Hurricane Harvey from 20 August 2017 to 30 August 2017. The dataset consists of around 400,000 tweets and is available on Kaggle. Next, a BERT-based model is employed to predict emotions associated with tweets posted by users. Then, natural language processing (NLP) techniques are utilized on negative-emotion tweets to explore the trends and prevalence of the topics discussed during the disaster event. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, we identified themes, enabling us to manually extract stressors termed as climate-change-related stressors. Results show that 20 climate-change-related stressors were extracted and that emotions peaked during the deadliest phase of the disaster. This indicates that tracking emotions may be a useful approach for studying environmentally determined well-being outcomes in light of understanding climate change impacts.
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On Identifying Hashtags in Disaster Twitter Data
Tweet hashtags have the potential to improve the search for information during disaster events. However, there is a large number of disaster-related tweets that do not have any user-provided hashtags. Moreover, only a small number of tweets that contain actionable hashtags are useful for disaster response. To facilitate progress on automatic identification (or extraction) of disaster hashtags for Twitter data, we construct a unique dataset of disaster-related tweets annotated with hashtags useful for filtering actionable information. Using this dataset, we further investigate Long Short-Term Memory-based models within a Multi-Task Learning framework. The best performing model achieves an F1-score as high as $92.22%$. The dataset, code, and other resources are available on Github.1
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- Award ID(s):
- 1741345
- PAR ID:
- 10204488
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Volume:
- 34
- Issue:
- 01
- ISSN:
- 2159-5399
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 498 to 506
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i01.5387
