Transformer-based Multi-Task Learning for crisis actionability extraction

• Main Authors: ZHANG, Yuhao, LO, Siaw Ling, WIN MYINT, Phyo Yi
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
• Subjects: Actionability; Crisis response; Multi-Task Learning; Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Social Media
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8517; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9520/viewcontent/icis23_final_cam_ready__1_.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Social media has become a valuable information source for crisis informatics. While various methods were proposed to extract relevant information during a crisis, their adoption by field practitioners remains low. In recent fieldwork, actionable information was identified as the primary information need for crisis responders and a key component in bridging the significant gap in existing crisis management tools. In this paper, we proposed a Crisis Actionability Extraction System for filtering, classification, phrase extraction, severity estimation, localization, and aggregation of actionable information altogether. We examined the effectiveness of transformer-based LSTM-CRF architecture in Twitter-related sequence tagging tasks and simultaneously extracted actionable information such as situational details and crisis impact via Multi-Task Learning. We demonstrated the system’s practical value in a case study of a real-world crisis and showed its effectiveness in aiding crisis responders with making well-informed decisions, mitigating risks, and navigating the complexities of the crisis.