Interactive Disaster Information Search System for Microblog by Minimal User Feedback

During disastrous events, much information is posted on microblogging services. These postings sometimes contain important information concerning, for example, safety and support for afflicted people. However, due to the overwhelming volume of information on microblog, it is often difficult to find such useful information using the current microblogging search system. Given the background, this paper proposes two types of interfaces for effectively identifying useful information in the event of disasters. First, postings containing similar contents are grouped and displayed in the chronological order so that users could easily identify a group of messages directly relevant to their urgent needs. Second, a message chosen by the users is used to reformulate the initial search query to refine the search results. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed interfaces, a user study is conducted on the Twitter Corpus collected during the event of the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011.