Socially Enhanced Situation Awareness from Microblogs using Artificial Intelligence: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews AI methods for extracting situation awareness from microblog social media data across various domains, highlighting key approaches, challenges, and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of AI techniques applied to social media data for situation awareness, with a novel unified methodological perspective.

Findings

Summarizes state-of-the-art AI approaches in six thematic areas.

Identifies key challenges in processing unstructured social media data.

Suggests future research directions for improving situation awareness.

Abstract

The rise of social media platforms provides an unbounded, infinitely rich source of aggregate knowledge of the world around us, both historic and real-time, from a human perspective. The greatest challenge we face is how to process and understand this raw and unstructured data, go beyond individual observations and see the "big picture"--the domain of Situation Awareness. We provide an extensive survey of Artificial Intelligence research, focusing on microblog social media data with applications to Situation Awareness, that gives the seminal work and state-of-the-art approaches across six thematic areas: Crime, Disasters, Finance, Physical Environment, Politics, and Health and Population. We provide a novel, unified methodological perspective, identify key results and challenges, and present ongoing research directions.