text: In a disaster situation, first responders need to quickly acquire situational awareness and prioritize response based on the need, resources available and impact. Can they do this based on digital media such as Twitter alone, or newswire alone, or some combination of the two? We examine this question in the context of the 2015 Nepal Earthquakes. Because newswire articles are longer, effective summaries can be helpful in saving time yet giving key content. We evaluate the effectiveness of several unsupervised summarization techniques in capturing key content. We propose a method to link tweets written by the public and newswire articles, so that we can compare their key characteristics: timeliness, whether tweets appear earlier than their corresponding news articles, and content. A novel idea is to view relevant tweets as a summary of the matching news article and evaluate these summaries. Whenever possible, we present both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. One of our main findings is that tweets and newswire articles provide complementary perspectives that form a holistic view of the disaster situation.
  @cite_35: 
  @cite_14: Immediately following the Boston Marathon attacks, individuals near the scene posted a deluge of data to social media sites. Previous work has shown that these data can be leveraged to provide rapid insight during natural disasters, disease outbreaks and ongoing conflicts that can assist in the public health and medical response. Here, we examine and discuss the social media messages posted immediately after and around the Boston Marathon bombings, and find that specific keywords appear frequently prior to official public safety and news media reports. Individuals immediately adjacent to the explosions posted messages within minutes via Twitter which identify the location and specifics of events, demonstrating a role for social media in the early recognition and characterization of emergency events. *Christopher Cassa and Rumi Chunara contributed equally to this work. Language: en
  @cite_7: Little is known about the ways in which social media, such as Twitter, function as conduits for information related to crises and emergencies. The current study analyzed the content of over 1,500 Tweets that were sent in the days leading up to the landfall of Hurricane Sandy. Time-series analyses reveal that relevant information became less prevalent as the crisis moved from the prodromal to acute phase, and information concerning specific remedial behaviors was absent. Implications for government agencies and emergency responders are discussed.
  @cite_28: Abstract The importance of timely, accurate and effective use of available information is essential to the proper management of emergency situations. In recent years, emerging technologies have provided new approaches towards the distribution and acquisition of crowdsourced information to facilitate situational awareness and management during emergencies. In this regard, internet and social networks have shown potential to be an effective tool in disseminating and obtaining up-to-date information. Among the most popular social networks, research has pointed to Twitter as a source of information that offers valuable real-time data for decision-making. The objective of this paper is to conduct a systematic literature review that provides an overview of the current state of research concerning the use of Twitter to emergencies management, as well as presents the challenges and future research directions.
  @cite_1: Social media such as Facebook and Twitter have proven to be a useful resource to understand public opinion towards real world events. In this paper, we investigate over 1.5 million Twitter messages (tweets) for the period 9th March 2011 to 31st May 2011 in order to track awareness and anxiety levels in the Tokyo metropolitan district to the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and subsequent tsunami and nuclear emergencies. These three events were tracked using both English and Japanese tweets. Preliminary results indicated: 1) close correspondence between Twitter data and earthquake events, 2) strong correlation between English and Japanese tweets on the same events, 3) tweets in the native language play an important roles in early warning, 4) tweets showed how quickly Japanese people’s anxiety returned to normal levels after the earthquake event. Several distinctions between English and Japanese tweets on earthquake events are also discussed. The results suggest that Twitter data can be used as a useful resource for tracking the public mood of populations affected by natural disasters as well as an early warning system.
summary: Twitter for emergency applications has been studied by several researchers, e.g., @cite_35 @cite_14 @cite_7 @cite_1 @cite_28 . @cite_35 , researchers concluded that Twitter was not yet ready for first responders. However, it was helpful for civilians. These were the early days of Twitter, as we find from @cite_14 that individuals immediately posted specific information helpful to early recognition and characterization of emergency events'' in the case of the Boston marathon bombing. @cite_7 , researchers found that tangible, useful information was found in the early period before storm system Sandy and it got buried in emotional tweets as the storm actually hit. However, we think more studies are needed on this issue, since the tweets collected were rather small, approximately 27,000, using just the hashtag #sandy. A bilingual analysis of tweets obtained over 84 days overlapping the Tohoku earthquake showed, among other results, the correlation between Twitter data and earthquake events @cite_1 . A survey of this literature can be found in @cite_28 .