DisDSS 2.0: A Multi-Hazard Web-based Disaster Management System to Identify Disaster-Relevancy of a Social Media Message for Decision-Making Using Deep Learning Techniques

According to UNDRR2021, there are 389 reported disasters in 2020. Disasters claim the lives of 15,080 people, 98.4 million people are affected globally, and US171.3 billion dollars are spent on economic damage. International agreements such as the Sendai framework for disaster risk reduction encourage the use of social media to strengthen disaster risk communication. With the advent of new technologies, social media has emerged out to be an important source of information in disaster management, and there is an increase in social media activity whilst disasters. Social media is the fourth most used platform for accessing emergency information. People seek to contact family, friends and search for food, water, transportation, and shelter. During cataclysmic events, the critical information posted on social media is immersed in irrelevant information. To assist and streamline emergency situations, staunch methodologies are required for extracting relevant information. The research study explores new-fangled deep learning methods for automatically identifying the relevancy of disaster-related social media messages. The contributions of this study are three-fold. Firstly, we present a hybrid deep learning-based framework to ameliorate the classification of disaster-related social media messages. The data is gathered from the Twitter platform, using the Search Application Programming Interface. The messages that contain information regarding the need, availability of vital resources like food, water, electricity, etc., and provide situational information are categorized into relevant messages. The rest of the messages are categorized into irrelevant messages. To demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach, it is applied to the thunderstorm and cyclone Fani dataset. Both the disasters happened in India in 2019. Secondly, the performance of the proposed approach is compared with baseline methods, i.e., convolutional neural network, long short-term memory network, bidirectional long short-term memory network. The results of the proposed approach outperform the baseline methods. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated using multiple metrics. The considered evaluation metrics are accuracy, precision, recall, f-score, area under receiver operating curve, area under precision-recall curve. The accurate and inaccurate classifications are shown on both the datasets. Thirdly, to incorporate our evaluated models into a working application, we extend an existing application DisDSS, which has been granted copyright invention award by Government of India. We call the newly extended system DisDSS 2.0, which integrates our framework to address the disaster relevancy identification issue. The output from the research study is helpful for disaster managers to make effective decisions on time. It bridges the gap between the decision-makers and citizens during disasters through the lens of deep learning.