journal article·2025-04-14Open access

Social Media Analytics for Disaster Response: Classification and Geospatial Visualization Framework

Chao He, Da Hu

Applied Sciences· Volume 15· Issue 8

Abstract

Social media has become an indispensable resource in disaster response, providing real-time crowdsourced data on public experiences, needs, and conditions during crises. This user-generated content enables government agencies and emergency responders to identify emerging threats, prioritize resource allocation, and optimize relief operations through data-driven insights. We present an AI-powered framework that combines natural language processing with geospatial visualization to analyze disaster-related social media content. Our solution features a text analysis model that achieved an 81.4% F1 score in classifying Twitter/X posts, integrated with an interactive web platform that maps emotional trends and crisis situations across geographic regions. The system’s dynamic visualization capabilities allow authorities to monitor situational developments through an interactive map, facilitating targeted response coordination. The experimental results show the model’s effectiveness in extracting actionable intelligence from Twitter/X posts during natural disasters.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Public Relations and Crisis Communication

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Kennesaw State University, Marietta, GA 30060, USA

Funding

US National Science Foundation (NSF)

References (28)

Show source-provided references
1. Using Social Media to Call for Help in Hurricane Harvey: Bonding Emotion, Culture, and Community Relationships10.1016/j.ijdrr.2019.101212 ↗
2. Toraman, C., Kucukkaya, I.E., Ozcelik, O., and Sahin, U. (2023). Tweets Under the Rubble: Detection of Messages Calling for Help in Earthquake Disaster. arXiv.
3. Harnessing Prompt-Based Large Language Models for Disaster Monitoring and Automated Reporting from Social Media Feedback10.1016/j.osnem.2024.100295 ↗
4. HumAID: Human-Annotated Disaster Incidents Data from Twitter with Deep Learning Benchmarks10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18116 ↗
5. Imran, M., Elbassuoni, S., Castillo, C., Diaz, F., and Meier, P. (2013, January 13). Practical Extraction of Disaster-Relevant Information from Social Media. Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web, New York, NY, USA.10.1145/2487788.2488109 ↗
6. Imran, M., Mitra, P., and Castillo, C. (2016, January 1). Twitter as a Lifeline: Human-Annotated Twitter Corpora for NLP of Crisis-Related Messages. Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16), Portorož, Slovenia.
7. CrisisMMD: Multimodal Twitter Datasets from Natural Disasters10.1609/icwsm.v12i1.14983 ↗
8. Mccreadie, R., Buntain, C., and Soboroff, I. (2019, January 19). TREC Incident Streams: Finding Actionable Information on Social Media. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Valencia, Spain.
9. Automatic Identification of Eyewitness Messages on Twitter during Disasters10.1016/j.ipm.2019.102107 ↗
10. Wiegmann, M., Kersten, J., and Klan, F. (2020, January 19). Analysis of Detection Models for Disaster-Related Tweets. Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Blacksburg, VA, USA.
11. CrisisBench: Benchmarking Crisis-Related Social Media Datasets for Humanitarian Information Processing10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18115 ↗
12. Social Media Information Sharing for Natural Disaster Response10.1007/s11069-021-04528-9 ↗
13. Burel, G., and Alani, H. (2018, January 18). Crisis Event Extraction Service (CREES)—Automatic Detection and Classification of Crisis-Related Content on Social Media. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Rochester, NY, USA.
14. Robust Classification of Crisis-Related Data on Social Networks Using Convolutional Neural Networks10.1609/icwsm.v11i1.14950 ↗
15. Alam, F., Ofli, F., Imran, M., Alam, T., and Qazi, U. (2020, January 7–10). Deep Learning Benchmarks and Datasets for Social Media Image Classification for Disaster Response. Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), The Hague, The Netherlands.10.1109/ASONAM49781.2020.9381294 ↗
16. Urban Flood Susceptibility Mapping Based on Social Media Data in Chengdu City, China10.1016/j.scs.2022.104307 ↗
17. Otal, H.T., Stern, E., and Canbaz, M.A. (2024, January 11–14). LLM-Assisted Crisis Management: Building Advanced LLM Platforms for Effective Emergency Response and Public Collaboration. Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence (CAI), Singapore.10.1109/CAI59869.2024.00159 ↗
18. The Rising Role of Big Data Analytics and IoT in Disaster Management: Recent Advances, Taxonomy and Prospects10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2913340 ↗
19. Leveraging VOSviewer Approach for Mapping, Visualisation, and Interpretation of Crisis Data for Disaster Management and Decision-Making
20. Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., and Toutanova, K. (2019, January 2–7). BERT: Pre-Training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
21. Liu, Y., Ott, M., and Goyal, N. (2019). RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach. arXiv.
22. Clark, K., Luong, M.-T., Le, Q.V., and Manning, C.D. (2020). ELECTRA: Pre-Training Text Encoders as Discriminators Rather Than Generators. arXiv.
23. Lan, Z., Chen, M., and Goodman, S. (2020). ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-Supervised Learning of Language Representations. arXiv.
24. Sanh, V., Debut, L., Chaumond, J., and Wolf, T. (2020). DistilBERT, a Distilled Version of BERT: Smaller, Faster, Cheaper and Lighter. arXiv.
25. Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences
26. Warner, B., Chaffin, A., and Clavié, B. (2024). Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference. arXiv.
27. (2025, March 08). Cajun Navy. Available online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cajun_Navy.
28. Sloan, L., and Morgan, J. (2015). Who Tweets with Their Location? Understanding the Relationship between Demographic Characteristics and the Use of Geoservices and Geotagging on Twitter. PLoS ONE, 10.10.1371/journal.pone.0142209 ↗