Real-time Knowledge Structure Mapping from Twitter for Damage Information Retrieval during a Disaster

Twitter is a useful medium to grasp various damage situations that have occurred in society. However, it is a laborious task to spot damage-related topics according to time in the environment where information is constantly produced. This paper proposes a methodology of constructing a knowledge structure by combining the BERT-based classifier and the community detection techniques to discover the topics underlain in the damage information. The methodology consists of two steps. In the first step, the tweets are classified into the classes that are related to human damage, infrastructure damage, and industrial activity damage by a BERT-based transfer learning approach. In the second step, networks of the words that appear in the damage-related tweets are constructed based on the co-occurrence matrix. The derived networks are partitioned by maximizing the modularity to reveal the hidden topics. Five keywords with high values of degree centrality are selected to interpret the topics. The proposed methodology is validated with the Hurricane Harvey test data.