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.