Whom should I follow? Identifying relevant users during crises

Shamanth Kumar, Fred Morstatter, Reza Zafarani, Huan Liu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

55 Scopus citations

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationHT 2013 - Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
Pages139-147
Number of pages9
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Event24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, HT 2013 - Paris, France
Duration: May 1 2013May 3 2013

Publication series

NameHT 2013 - Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media

Conference

Conference24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, HT 2013
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityParis
Period5/1/135/3/13

Keywords

  • Crisis monitoring
  • Microblogging
  • Twitter
  • User identification
  • User relevance measurement

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Software

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