Multimodal Semi-supervised Learning for Disaster Tweet Classification
Iustin Sirbu, Tiberiu Sosea, Cornelia Caragea, Doina Caragea, Traian Rebedea
Abstract
During natural disasters, people often use social media platforms, such as Twitter, to post information about casualties and damage produced by disasters. This information can help relief authorities gain situational awareness in nearly real time, and enable them to quickly distribute resources where most needed. However, annotating data for this purpose can be burdensome, subjective and expensive. In this paper, we investigate how to leverage the copious amounts of unlabeled data generated on social media by disaster eyewitnesses and affected individuals during disaster events. To this end, we propose a semi-supervised learning approach to improve the performance of neural models on several multimodal disaster tweet classification tasks. Our approach shows significant improvements, obtaining up to 7.7% improvements in F-1 in low-data regimes and 1.9% when using the entire training data. We make our code and data publicly available at https://github.com/iustinsirbu13/multimodal-ssl-for-disaster-tweet-classification.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{sirbu-etal-2022-multimodal,
title = "Multimodal Semi-supervised Learning for Disaster Tweet Classification",
author = "Sirbu, Iustin and
Sosea, Tiberiu and
Caragea, Cornelia and
Caragea, Doina and
Rebedea, Traian",
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Huang, Chu-Ren and
Kim, Hansaem and
Pustejovsky, James and
Wanner, Leo and
Choi, Key-Sun and
Ryu, Pum-Mo and
Chen, Hsin-Hsi and
Donatelli, Lucia and
Ji, Heng and
Kurohashi, Sadao and
Paggio, Patrizia and
Xue, Nianwen and
Kim, Seokhwan and
Hahm, Younggyun and
He, Zhong and
Lee, Tony Kyungil and
Santus, Enrico and
Bond, Francis and
Na, Seung-Hoon",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = oct,
year = "2022",
address = "Gyeongju, Republic of Korea",
publisher = "International Committee on Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.239/",
pages = "2711--2723"
}