On Semantics and Deep Learning for Event Detection in Crisis Situations

In this paper, we introduce Dual-CNN, a semantically-enhanced deep learning model to target the problem of event detection in crisis situations from social media data. A layer of semantics is added to a traditional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model to capture the contextual information that is generally scarce in short, ill-formed social media messages. Our results show that our methods are able to successfully identify the existence of events, and event types (hurricane, floods, etc.) accurately (> 79% F-measure), but the performance of the model significantly drops (61% F-measure) when identifying fine-grained event-related information (affected individuals, damaged infrastructures, etc.). These results are competitive with more traditional Machine Learning models, such as SVM.