How do people describe locations during a natural disaster: an analysis of tweets from Hurricane Harvey

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how people describe locations during Hurricane Harvey on Twitter, evaluates the effectiveness of existing geoparsers in extracting these locations, and discusses improvements for better disaster response.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of location descriptions in social media during a disaster and identifies limitations of current geoparsers in this context.

Findings

Existing geoparsers have limitations in recognizing disaster-related location descriptions.

Analysis reveals diverse and informal location descriptions in tweets during Hurricane Harvey.

Discussion suggests potential improvements for geoparsers to better support disaster response.

Abstract

Social media platforms, such as Twitter, have been increasingly used by people during natural disasters to share information and request for help. Hurricane Harvey was a category 4 hurricane that devastated Houston, Texas, USA in August 2017 and caused catastrophic flooding in the Houston metropolitan area. Hurricane Harvey also witnessed the widespread use of social media by the general public in response to this major disaster, and geographic locations are key information pieces described in many of the social media messages. A geoparsing system, or a geoparser, can be utilized to automatically extract and locate the described locations, which can help first responders reach the people in need. While a number of geoparsers have already been developed, it is unclear how effective they are in recognizing and geo-locating the locations described by people during natural disasters. To fill this gap, this work seeks to understand how people describe locations during a natural disaster by analyzing a sample of tweets posted during Hurricane Harvey. We then identify the limitations of existing geoparsers in processing these tweets, and discuss possible approaches to overcoming these limitations.