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Information retrieval of a disaster event from cross-platform social media

Shi Shen (State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China and Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Disaster, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China and Center for Geodata and Analysis, Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China)
Nikita Murzintcev (LREIS, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Beijing, China)
Changqing Song (State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China and Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Disaster, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China and Center for Geodata and Analysis, Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China)
Changxiu Cheng (State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China and Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Disaster, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China and Center for Geodata and Analysis, Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China)

Information Discovery and Delivery

ISSN: 2398-6247

Article publication date: 20 November 2017

704

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to propose a method to retrieve data on an event based on a preliminary collection of event-specific hashtags.

Design/methodology/approach

Extra knowledge, or a list of events with recorded features that can be used to characterize an event and separate it from other simultaneously occurring social phenomena, is employed. The first step involves the estimation and use of the impact area to retrieve messages from Twitter. This is followed by an extraction of hashtags from these messages. After that, the noisy hashtags would be filtered out by some heuristic rules. Finally, hashtags are used to collect relevant messages from not only Twitter but also other social media platforms.

Findings

The proposed method has high selectivity and is able to collect distinct sets of hashtags even for similar simultaneous events. In addition, spatial and temporal features are sufficient to improve collecting information of disaster events.

Originality/value

This work discusses a method of information retrieval of an event from cross-platform social media. The proposed method can be applied to other studies of geographically related events.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 41771537] and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

Citation

Shen, S., Murzintcev, N., Song, C. and Cheng, C. (2017), "Information retrieval of a disaster event from cross-platform social media", Information Discovery and Delivery, Vol. 45 No. 4, pp. 220-226. https://doi.org/10.1108/IDD-01-2017-0003

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited

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