Visual Themes and Sentiment on Social Networks To Aid First Responders During Crisis Events
Prateek Dewan, Varun Bharadhwaj, Aditi Mithal, Anshuman Suri,, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru

TL;DR
This study analyzes visual and textual content on social networks during the 2015 Paris terror attacks, revealing distinct themes and sentiment patterns in images versus text, with implications for first responders.
Contribution
It introduces the first large-scale analysis of images during a crisis, uncovering visual themes and misinformation not evident in text, aiding emergency response efforts.
Findings
Images revealed hidden themes not found in text
Misinformation and conspiracy theories were prominent in images
Text reflected negative sentiment, images showed positive sentiment
Abstract
Online Social Networks explode with activity whenever a crisis event takes place. Most content generated as part of this activity is a mixture of text and images, and is particularly useful for first responders to identify popular topics of interest and gauge the pulse and sentiment of citizens. While multiple researchers have used text to identify, analyze and measure themes and public sentiment during such events, little work has explored visual themes floating on networks in the form of images, and the sentiment inspired by them. Given the potential of visual content for influencing users' thoughts and emotions, we perform a large scale analysis to compare popular themes and sentiment across images and textual content posted on Facebook during the terror attacks that took place in Paris in 2015. Using state-of-the-art image summarization techniques, we discovered multiple visual…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsMisinformation and Its Impacts · Complex Network Analysis Techniques · Public Relations and Crisis Communication
