Analyzing Tweets on Malaysia Flight #MH370

My QCRI colleague Dr. Imran is using our AIDR platform (Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response) to collect & analyze tweets related to Malaysia Flight 370 that went missing several days ago. He has collected well over 850,000 English-language tweets since March 11th; using the following keywords/hashtags: Malaysia Airlines flight, #MH370m #PrayForMH370 and #MalaysiaAirlines.

Imran then used AIDR to create a number of “machine learning classifiers” to automatically classify all incoming tweets into categories that he is interested in:

• Informative: tweets that relay breaking news, useful info, etc

• Praying: tweets that are related to prayers and faith

• Personal: tweets that express personal opinions

The process is super simple. All he does is tag several dozen incoming tweets into their respective categories. This teaches AIDR what an “Informative” tweet should “look like”. Since our novel approach combines human intelligence with artificial intelligence, AIDR is typically far more accurate at capturing relevant tweets than Twitter’s keyword search.

And the more tweets that Imran tags, the more accurate AIDR gets. At present, AIDR can auto-classify ~500 tweets per second, or 30,000 tweets per minute. This is well above the highest velocity of crisis tweets recorded thus far—16,000 tweets/minute during Hurricane Sandy.

The graph below depicts the number of tweets generated since the day we started collecting the AIDR collection, i.e., March 11th.

This series of pie charts simply reflects the relative share of tweets per category over the past four days.

Below are some of the tweets that AIDR has automatically classified as being Informative (click to enlarge). The “Confidence” score simply reflects how confident AIDR is that it has correctly auto-classified a tweet. Note that Imran could also have crowdsourced the manual tagging—that is, he could have crowdsourced the process of teaching AIDR. To learn more about how AIDR works, please see this short overview and this research paper (PDF).

If you’re interested in testing AIDR (still very much under development) and/or would like the Tweet ID’s for the 850,000+ tweets we’ve collected using AIDR, then feel free to contact me. In the meantime, we’ll start a classifier that auto-collects tweets related to hijacking, criminal causes, and so on. If you’d like us to create a classifier for a different topic, let us know—but we can’t make any promises since we’re working on an important project deadline. When we’re further along with the development of AIDR, anyone will be able to easily collect & download tweets and create & share their own classifiers for events related to humanitarian issues.

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Imran for collecting and classifying the tweets. Imran also shared the graphs and tabular output that appears above.