Understanding the Behavior of Filipino Twitter Users during Disaster

The Philippines is a country that frequently experiences disasters, such as typhoons. During these events, many citizens spread information and communicate with each other through social media like Twitter. This study aims to take advantage of that fact by analyzing the data from social media to get some insights on the situation. Specifically, this paper studies the behavior of Filipinos on Twitter during a disaster, and tries to see the differences between participants, or the direct victims of the disaster, and observers. The study used Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Principal Component Analysis to extract the different topics discussed during a disaster, and found out which topics participants are more likely to talk about. Results also show which topics are more likely to be retweeted, which language participants in disaster use more often, and what emotions are present in the disaster-time tweets of Filipinos.

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