In a disaster situation, first responders need to quickly acquire situational awareness and prioritize response based on the need, resources available and impact. Can they do this based on digital media such as Twitter alone, or newswire alone, or some combination of the two? We examine this question in the context of the 2015 Nepal Earthquakes. Because newswire articles are longer, effective summaries can be helpful in saving time yet giving key content. We evaluate the effectiveness of several unsupervised summarization techniques in capturing key content. We propose a method to link tweets written by the public and newswire articles, so that we can compare their key characteristics: timeliness, whether tweets appear earlier than their corresponding news articles, and content. A novel idea is to view relevant tweets as a summary of the matching news article and evaluate these summaries. Whenever possible, we present both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. One of our main findings is that tweets and newswire articles provide complementary perspectives that form a holistic view of the disaster situation.
Tweet summarization has also been studied, e.g., see @cite_23 and references cited therein. Our problem is a little different, we consider tweets that are linked and found relevant (or partially relevant) to news articles from the perspective of summaries of those news articles. We then evaluate them to get an idea of how much content of the articles is captured by these tweets.
@cite_23
1966421434
Single-document summarization is a challenging task. In this paper, we explore effective ways using the tweets linking to news for generating extractive summary of each document. We reveal the very basic value of tweets that can be utilized by regarding every tweet as a vote for candidate sentences. Base on such finding, we resort to unsupervised summarization models by leveraging the linking tweets to master the ranking of candidate extracts via random walk on a heterogeneous graph. The advantage is that we can use the linking tweets to opportunistically "supervise" the summarization with no need of reference summaries. Furthermore, we analyze the influence of the volume and latency of tweets on the quality of output summaries since tweets come after news release. Compared to truly supervised summarizer unaware of tweets, our method achieves significantly better results with reasonably small tradeoff on latency; compared to the same using tweets as auxiliary features, our method is comparable while needing less tweets and much shorter time to achieve significant outperformance.