# Newswire versus Social Media for Disaster Response and Recovery

## TL;DR

This paper compares Twitter and newswire sources during the 2015 Nepal Earthquakes, evaluating their timeliness, content, and potential to provide comprehensive disaster situational awareness through summarization and linkage techniques.

## Contribution

It introduces a method to link tweets and newswire articles, evaluates summarization techniques, and demonstrates their complementary roles in disaster response analysis.

## Key findings

- Tweets often appear earlier than newswire articles.
- Tweets and newswire provide complementary perspectives.
- Unsupervised summarization can effectively capture key content.

## Abstract

In a disaster situation, first responders need to quickly acquire situational awareness and prioritize response based on the need, resources available and impact. Can they do this based on digital media such as Twitter alone, or newswire alone, or some combination of the two? We examine this question in the context of the 2015 Nepal Earthquakes. Because newswire articles are longer, effective summaries can be helpful in saving time yet giving key content. We evaluate the effectiveness of several unsupervised summarization techniques in capturing key content. We propose a method to link tweets written by the public and newswire articles, so that we can compare their key characteristics: timeliness, whether tweets appear earlier than their corresponding news articles, and content. A novel idea is to view relevant tweets as a summary of the matching news article and evaluate these summaries. Whenever possible, we present both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. One of our main findings is that tweets and newswire articles provide complementary perspectives that form a holistic view of the disaster situation.