Going Beyond Content Richness: Verified Information Aware Summarization of Crisis-Related Microblogs

High-impact catastrophic events (bomb attacks, shootings) trigger posting of large volume of information on social media platforms such as Twitter. Recent works have proposed content-aware systems for summarizing this information, thereby facilitating post-disaster services. However, a significant proportion of the posted content is unverified, which restricts the practical usage of the existing summarization systems. In this paper, we work on the novel task of generating verified summaries of information posted on Twitter during disasters. We first jointly learn representations of content-classes and expression-classes of tweets posted during disasters using a novel LDA-based generative model. These representations of content & expression classes are used in conjunction with pre-disaster user behavior and temporal signals (replies) for training a Tree-LSTM based tweet-verification model. The model infers tweet verification probabilities which are used, besides information content of tweets, in an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) framework for generating the desired verified summaries. The summaries are fine-tuned using the class information of the tweets as obtained from the LDA-based generative model. Extensive experiments are performed on a publicly-available labeled dataset of man-made disasters which demonstrate the effectiveness of our tweet-verification (3-13% gain over baselines) and summarization (12-48% gain in verified content proportion, 8-13% gain in ROUGE-score over state-of-the-art) systems. We make implementations of our various modules available online.