# Twitter Speaks: A Case of National Disaster Situational Awareness

## TL;DR

This paper introduces TwiSA, a social media analysis framework that leverages Twitter data with text mining techniques to enhance situational awareness during natural disasters, demonstrated through the 2015 South Carolina flood.

## Contribution

It presents a novel analytical framework combining sentiment analysis and topic modeling for disaster situational awareness using Twitter data.

## Key findings

- TwiSA effectively tracks public concerns during disasters.
- Social media analysis provides timely insights compared to traditional surveys.
- Framework improves disaster response and recovery efforts.

## Abstract

In recent years, we have been faced with a series of natural disasters causing a tremendous amount of financial, environmental, and human losses. The unpredictable nature of natural disasters' behavior makes it hard to have a comprehensive situational awareness (SA) to support disaster management. Using opinion surveys is a traditional approach to analyze public concerns during natural disasters; however, this approach is limited, expensive, and time-consuming. Luckily the advent of social media has provided scholars with an alternative means of analyzing public concerns. Social media enable users (people) to freely communicate their opinions and disperse information regarding current events including natural disasters. This research emphasizes the value of social media analysis and proposes an analytical framework: Twitter Situational Awareness (TwiSA). This framework uses text mining methods including sentiment analysis and topic modeling to create a better SA for disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. TwiSA has also effectively deployed on a large number of tweets and tracks the negative concerns of people during the 2015 South Carolina flood.