BIGDATA: IA: Collaborative Research: Domain Adaptation Approaches for Classifying Crisis Related Data on Social Media

该项目调查了使用大数据分析技术将社交媒体中与危机相关的数据按照情景感知类别进行分类，如警告、建议、死亡、伤害和支持，目的是帮助应急小组识别有用的信息。一个主要的挑战是数据的规模，在灾难期间，数百万条短消息被连续发布，需要进行分析。由于缺乏紧急目标灾难的标签数据，以及每个事件在地理、文化、基础设施、技术和参与人员方面都是独一无二的，基于自动机器学习的当前技术的使用受到限制。为了应对上述挑战，设计了一种领域自适应技术，该技术利用现有的来自先前灾难的标记数据和来自当前灾难的未标记数据。根据众包志愿者的反馈，最终得到的模型会不断更新和改进。这项研究将为应急组织提供真正可用的解决方案，并将使这些组织能够提高其响应的速度、质量和效率。这项研究提供了基于领域自适应和深度神经网络的新颖解决方案，以应对将机器学习应用于危机相关数据分析的独特挑战，特别是大数据的数据量和速度挑战。领域适应方法能够将信息从先前的源灾难转移到紧急目标灾难。深度学习方法使得使用大量的已标记的源数据和未标记的目标数据成为可能，并且随着更多的已标记的目标数据变得可用来增量地更新模型。对来源和目标危机的组合进行大规模分析，将有助于确定可转移的态势认识知识的模式。由此产生的技术和社会解决方案将混合在一起，用于数据管理和应急响应。

The project investigates the use of big-data analysis techniques for classifying crisis-related data in social media with respect to situational awareness categories, such as caution, advice, fatality, injury, and support, with the goal of helping emergency response teams identify useful information. A major challenge is the scale of the data, where millions of short messages are continuously posted during a disaster, and need to be analyzed. The use of current technologies based on automated machine learning is limited due to the lack of labeled data for an emergent target disaster, and the fact that every event is unique in terms of geography, culture, infrastructure, technology, and the people involved. To tackle the above challenges, domain adaptation techniques that make use of existing labeled data from prior disasters and unlabeled data from a current disaster are designed. The resulting models are continuously updated and improved based on feedback from crowdsourcing volunteers. The research will provide real, usable solutions to emergency response organizations and will enable these organizations to improve the speed, quality and efficiency of their response. The research provides novel solutions based on domain adaptation and deep neural networks to tackle the unique challenges in applying machine learning for crisis-related data analysis, specifically the volume and velocity challenges of big crisis data. Domain adaptation approaches enable the transfer of information from prior source disasters to an emergenet target disaster. Deep learning approaches make it possible to employ large amounts of labeled source data and unlabeled target data, and to incrementally update the models as more labeled target data becomes available. Large-scale analysis across combinations of source and target crises will help identify patterns of transferable situational awareness knowledge. The resulting technical and social solutions will be blended together for use in data management and emergency response.