Enhanced Messaging for the Emergency Response Sector (EMERSE)

My colleague Andrea Tapia and her team at PennState University have developed an interesting iPhone application designed to support humanitarian response. This application is part of their EMERSE project: Enhanced Messaging for the Emergency Response Sector. The other components of EMERSE include a Twitter crawler, automatic classification and machine learning.

The rationale for this important, applied research? “Social media used around crises involves self-organizing behavior that can produce accurate results, often in advance of official communications. This allows affected population to send tweets or text messages, and hence, make them heard. The ability to classify tweets and text messages automatically, together with the ability to deliver the relevant information to the appropriate personnel are essential for enabling the personnel to timely and efficiently work to address the most urgent needs, and to understand the emergency situation better” (Caragea et al., 2011).

The iPhone application developed by PennState is designed to help humanitarian professionals collect information during a crisis. “In case of no service or Internet access, the application rolls over to local storage until access is available. However, the GPS still works via satellite and is able to geo-locate data being recorded.” The Twitter crawler component captures tweets referring to specific keywords “within a seven-day period as well as tweets that have been posted by specific users. Each API call returns at most 1000 tweets and auxiliary metadata […].” The machine translation component uses Google Language API.

The more challenging aspect of EMERSE, however, is the automatic classification component. So the team made use of the Ushahidi Haiti data, which includes some 3,500 reports about half of which came from text messages. Each of these reports were tagged according to a specific (but not mutually exclusive category), e.g., Medical Emergency, Collapsed Structure, Shelter Needed, etc. The team at PennState experimented with various techniques from (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to automatically classify the Ushahidi Haiti data according to these pre-existing categories. The results demonstrate that “Feature Extraction” significantly outperforms other methods while Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers vary significantly depending on the category being coded. I wonder whether their approach is more or less effective than this one developed by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

In any event, PennState’s applied research was presented at the ISCRAM 2011 conference and the findings are written up in this paper (PDF): “Classifying Text Messages for the Haiti Earthquake.” The co-authors: Cornelia Caragea, Nathan McNeese, Anuj Jaiswal, Greg Traylor, Hyun-Woo Kim, Prasenjit Mitra, Dinghao Wu, Andrea H. Tapia, Lee Giles, Bernard J. Jansen, John Yen.

In conclusion, the team at PennState argue that the EMERSE system offers four important benefits not provided by Ushahidi.

“First, EMERSE will automatically classify tweets and text messages into topic, whereas Ushahidi collects reports with broad category information provided by the reporter. Second, EMERSE will also automatically geo-locate tweets and text messages, whereas Ushahidi relies on the reporter to provide the geo-location information. Third, in EMERSE, tweets and text messages are aggregated by topic and region to better understand how the needs of Haiti differ by regions and how they change over time. The automatic aggregation also helps to verify reports. A large number of similar reports by different people are more likely to be true. Finally, EMERSE will provide tweet broadcast and GeoRSS subscription by topics or region, whereas Ushahidi only allows reports to be downloaded.”

In terms of future research, the team may explore other types of abstraction based on semantically related words, and may also “design an emergency response ontology […].” So I recently got in touch with Andrea to get an update on this since their ISCRAM paper was published 14 months ago. I’ll be sure to share any update if this information can be made public.