Predictive Visual Analytics of Social Media Data for Supporting Real-Time Situational Awareness

Luke S Snyder, Purdue University

Abstract

Real-time social media data can provide useful information on evolving events and situations. In addition, various domain users are increasingly leveraging real-time social media data to gain rapid situational awareness. Informed by discussions with first responders and government officials, we focus on two major barriers limiting the widespread adoption of social media for situational awareness: the lack of geotagged data and the deluge of irrelevant information during events. Geotags are naturally useful, as they indicate the location of origin and provide geographic context. Only a small portion of social media is geotagged, however, limiting its practical use for situational awareness. The deluge of irrelevant data provides equal difficulties, impeding the effective identification of semantically relevant information. Existing methods for short text relevance classification fail to incorporate users' knowledge into the classification process. Therefore, classifiers cannot be interactively retrained for specific events or user-dependent needs in real-time, limiting situational awareness. In this work, we first adapt, improve, and evaluate a state-of-the-art deep learning model for city-level geolocation prediction, and integrate it with a visual analytics system tailored for real-time situational awareness. We then present a novel interactive learning framework in which users rapidly identify relevant data by iteratively correcting the relevance classification of tweets in real-time. We integrate our framework with the extended Social Media Analytics and Reporting Toolkit (SMART) 2.0 system, allowing the use of our interactive learning framework within a visual analytics system adapted for real-time situational awareness.

Degree

M.Sc.

Advisors

Ebert, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Artificial intelligence|Educational technology|Web Studies

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