Tweet4act: Using incident-specific profiles for classifying crisis-related messages

We present Tweet4act, a system to detect and classify crisis-related messages communicated over a microblogging platform. Our system relies on extracting content features from each message. These features and the use of an incident-specific dictionary allow us to determine the period type of an incident that each message belongs to. The period types are: pre-incident (messages talking about prevention, mitigation, and preparedness), during-incident (messages sent while the incident is taking place), and post-incident (messages related to the response, recovery, and reconstruction). We show that our detection method can effectively identify incident-related messages with high precision and recall, and that our incident-period classification method outperforms standard machine learning classification methods.