TY - GEN
T1 - Whom should I follow? Identifying relevant users during crises
AU - Kumar, Shamanth
AU - Morstatter, Fred
AU - Zafarani, Reza
AU - Liu, Huan
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Social media is gaining popularity as a medium of communication before, during, and after crises. In several recent disasters, it has become evident that social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are an important source of information, and in cases they have even assisted in relief efforts. We propose a novel approach to identify a subset of active users during a crisis who can be tracked for fast access to information. Using a Twitter dataset that consists of 12.9 million tweets from 5 countries that are part of the "Arab Spring" movement, we show how instant information access can be achieved by user identification along two dimensions: user's location and the user's affinity towards topics of discussion. Through evaluations, we demonstrate that users selected by our approach generate more information and the quality of the information is better than that of users identified using state-of-the-art techniques.
AB - Social media is gaining popularity as a medium of communication before, during, and after crises. In several recent disasters, it has become evident that social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are an important source of information, and in cases they have even assisted in relief efforts. We propose a novel approach to identify a subset of active users during a crisis who can be tracked for fast access to information. Using a Twitter dataset that consists of 12.9 million tweets from 5 countries that are part of the "Arab Spring" movement, we show how instant information access can be achieved by user identification along two dimensions: user's location and the user's affinity towards topics of discussion. Through evaluations, we demonstrate that users selected by our approach generate more information and the quality of the information is better than that of users identified using state-of-the-art techniques.
KW - Crisis monitoring
KW - Microblogging
KW - Twitter
KW - User identification
KW - User relevance measurement
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84879770882&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84879770882&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2481492.2481507
DO - 10.1145/2481492.2481507
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9781450319676
T3 - HT 2013 - Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
SP - 139
EP - 147
BT - HT 2013 - Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
T2 - 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, HT 2013
Y2 - 1 May 2013 through 3 May 2013
ER -