A deep multi-modal neural network for informative Twitter content classification during emergencies

Abstract

People start posting tweets containing texts, images, and videos as soon as a disaster hits an area. The analysis of these disaster-related tweet texts, images, and videos can help humanitarian response organizations in better decision-making and prioritizing their tasks. Finding the informative contents which can help in decision making out of the massive volume of Twitter content is a difficult task and require a system to filter out the informative contents. In this paper, we present a multi-modal approach to identify disaster-related informative content from the Twitter streams using text and images together. Our approach is based on long-short-term-memory (LSTM) and VGG-16 networks that show significant improvement in the performance, as evident from the validation result on seven different disaster-related datasets. The range of F1-score varied from 0.74 to 0.93 when tweet texts and images used together, whereas, in the case of only tweet text, it varies from 0.61 to 0.92. From this result, it is evident that the proposed multi-modal system is performing significantly well in identifying disaster-related informative social media contents.