of thousands of tweets, mostly containing sentiments and opinions of the masses who are posting during such events. To effectively utilize microblogging sites during disaster events, a series of research work conducted by CNeRG IIT Kharagpure has extracted the situational information from among the large amounts of sentiment and opinion, determined the humanitarian categories like ‘infrastructure damage,’ ‘missing or found people,’ or ‘relief required’ of the tweets, and summarized the situational information in real time, to help decision-making processes when time is critical.

Another important observation is that apart from English, people also post situational updates in their local languages (predominantly Hindi in India)—hence the classification-summarization framework was extended to Hindi as well as code-mix (for example, part Hindi, part English) tweets. It has also been observed that some people take advantage of a panic situation, posting offensive content targeting specific religious communities during a disaster. Such communal posts deteriorate law and order and unfortunately it has been observed on the Indian subcontinent that this phenomenon is prevalent even during a natural disaster. Methods to detect such communal tweets and to characterize users who initiate and/or propagate them were developed.

Election and social media: Researchers in India have studied in detail the use of social media during the April/May 2019 elections in India and made several observations.f Besides the widespread usage of misleading messages and suspected (fake/bot) accounts, which are now observed in almost all elections, there were several specialties, including a substantial amount of satire video; female verified handles demonstrate more engagement compared to male verified accounts; and an important trending hashtags has been #Main-BhiChowkidar (#Iamthe WatchMan), which prompted around 5,000 users to add Chowkidar (Watchman) to their name in the social media handle.

Code mixing on social media. There e http://www.cnerg.org f http://labs.precog.iiitd.edu.in/elections-2019

we elaborate on some of the work, specifically focusing on a set of work that helps users get access to ‘useful’ and

‘sanitized’ content. We will also talk about the issues related to code-mixed text and the specific research undertaken to identify dangerous spots for clicking selfies.

Search and recommendation systems over OSM. In order to develop search and recommendation systems over OSMs, it is critical to have accurate methodologies for tasks like inferring the topical interests and expertise of users, and searching for experts on specific topics. Researchers proposed completely novel crowdsourcing-based methodologies for these tasks, for example, the topics of expertise of a user are inferred based on how other users describe the said user.

The proposed methodologies are far more accurate than content-based techniques, in inferring a wide range of topics of interest/expertise of users and identifying topical experts. It was earlier thought that OSMs like Twitter are only used for casual conversation among friends. However, several works1, 11 showed that Twitter is actually a treasure-trove of information on thousands of topics, ranging from popular topics like politics and sports, to specialized topics like neurology and forensics. The research has identified thousands of groups of Twitter users interested in these diverse topics. Along with proposing novel algorithms, the endeavor has resulted in the development and public deployment of several Web-based systems on the Twitter platform based upon the proposed algorithms, for example, topical search systems,c systems for inferring topical interest/expertise of users,d and so on.

These systems are currently being used by hundreds of users worldwide.

Efficient utilization of social media during disasters. Research has shown that microblogging sites like Twitter have become important sources of real-time information during disaster events. A significant amount of valuable situational information (updates about a current situation) is available from these sites. However, this information is immersed among hundreds c http://bit.ly/2kf9NGy and http://bit.ly/2l We YMk d http://bit.ly/2kCIZ3u and http://bit.ly/2kOJRSm

A lot of research
is directed
toward code-mixed
content, which
combines a local
language
and English.