User-assisted information extraction from twitter during emergencies

Disasters and emergencies bring uncertain situations. People involved in such situations look for quick answers to their rapid queries. Moreover, humanitarian organizations look for situational awareness information to launch relief operations. Existing studies show the usefulness of social media content during crisis situations. However, despite advances in information retrieval and text processing techniques, access to relevant information on Twitter is still a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to provide timely access to the relevant information on Twitter. Specifically, we employee Word2vec embeddings to expand initial users queries and based on a relevance feedback mechanism we retrieve relevant messages on Twitter in real-time. Initial experiments and user studies performed using a real world disaster dataset show the significance of the proposed approach.