The enormous growth of the use of social media during emergency situations has led to increasing amounts of information being available to assist emergency relief operations. Additionally, Online Social Media (OSM) content can also be utilised for emergency preparedness and early warning systems. Effective exploitation of the crowdsourced content posted on OSM requires reliable real-time IR methodologies, and integration of OSM content with other information sources. This workshop will explore the multifarious aspects of effective information extraction and exploitation from social media, for emergency relief, as well as emergency preparedness. Along with a peer-reviewed research paper track, the workshop will include a TREC-style data challenge. The two tracks (both overview and details) are as given below:
This track of the workshop aims to provide a research platform to explore the role of social media in emergency relief and management and requests for original research contributions related to the theme Exploitation of Social Media for Emergency Relief and Preparedness. The detailed aims and scope of this track are provided here.
This track of the workshop aims to promote development of IR methodologies for some practical challenges that need to be addressed during an emergency event, along with thorough evaluation and comparison of the methodologies. To fulfil this objective, we present a data challenge, following the style of TREC tracks. We will provide a large dataset of microblogs posted during the earthquake in Italy in August 2016, along with a set of queries. The participants are invite to participate in the following challenges:
The participants will be invited to submit solutions to the said challenges. We will arrange for evaluation of the submitted results. The top performing teams who participate in the data challenge will also be invited for participation in the workshop. More details are given here.
Papers (PDF only) should be submitted electronically through Easychair.
Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed, and the accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, which will be published online via the CEUR workshop proceedings publication service (ceur-ws.org, ISSN 1613-0073).
At least one authors of each accepted paper is expected to attend the workshop and present the paper.
The papers for the Peer-review Track should be submitted via Easychair.
The correspondence for the Data Challenge Track will be done via smerp2017 [at] gmail [dot] com.
For more details please see Call for Participation.
09:00 - 09:10 - Opening
09.10 - 10.10 - Keynote Address by Muhammad Imran: Time-Critical Analysis of Evolving Social Media Streams During Sudden-Onset Events [pdf]
10.10 - 10.25 - [Accepted paper] Situational Awareness for Low Resource Languages: the LORELEI Situation Frame Annotation Task. S. Strassel, A. Bies, J. Tracey [pdf]
10.25 - 10.40 - [Accepted paper] Weakly Supervised Classification of Tweets for Disaster Management. G. K. Palshikar, M. Apte, D. Pandita [pdf]
10.40 - 11.00 - Tea / Coffee Break
11.00 - 11.20 - Reporting on SMERP Data Challenge [Speaker: S. Ghosh]
11.20 - 11.40 - Presentations by teams participating in data challenge:
(i) Team from Radboud University [Speaker: H. Ali] [pdf]
(ii) Team from Dublin City University [Speaker: G. Jones] [pdf]
11.40 - 11.55 - [Accepted paper] Identification of Disaster-implicated Named Entities. J. Acs, D. M. Nemeskey, A. Kornai [pdf]
11.55 - 12.10 - [Accepted paper] Microblog Retrieval in a Disaster Situation: A New Test Collection for Evaluation. M. Basu, A. Roy, K. Ghosh, S. Bandyopadhyay, S. Ghosh [pdf]
12.10 - 12.30 - Discussion - I: Designing effective data challenges on exploiting social media for emergency relief and preparedness - the questions
12:30 - 13:30 - Lunch break
13:30 - 14:30 - Keynote Address by Richard McCreadie: Summarizing the Situation with Social Media Streams [pdf]
14:30 - 14:45 - [Accepted paper] Microblog Retrieval During Disasters: How To Create Ground Truths? R. Soni, S. Pal [pdf]
14:45 - 15:15 - Discussion - II: Designing effective data challenges on exploiting social media for emergency relief and preparedness - the answers
15:15 - 15:35 - Tea / Coffee Break
15:35 - 16:50 - Panel discussion: Where to go from here? The open challenges in exploiting social media for disaster relief and preparedness.
16:50 - 17:00 - Closing
The names of speakers are in bold, titles of talks italicized.
January 27, 2017 | Paper submission due |
March 6, 2017 | Notification of acceptance |
March 15, 2017 | Camera-ready submission due |
April 09, 2017 | Workshop |
November 07, 2016 | Data for Level 1 released |
December 20, 2016 | Submission of results and methodology description for Level 1 |
December 31, 2016 | Level 1 evaluation results declared; Level 2 data released |
February 6, 2017 | Submission of results and methodology description for Level 2 |
February 22, 2017 | Level 2 evaluation results declared |
March 7, 2017 | Submission of papers by top two teams for each track |
March 08, 2017 | Notification of reviews after shepherding |
March 15, 2017 | Camera-ready submission due |
April 09, 2017 | Workshop |
For queries about the data challenge, you can mail smerp2017 [at] gmail [dot] com.
For any other queries about the workshop, you can mail the following organizers:
Saptarshi Ghosh: saptarshi [dot] ghosh [at] gmail [dot] com
Kripabandhu Ghosh: kripa [dot] ghosh [at] gmail [dot] com