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.
Researchers have examined the question of whether Twitter can replace newswire for breaking news @cite_20 . They studied a period of 77 days in 2011 during which 27 events occurred. The biggest disasters in this event-set are: an airplane crash with 43 deaths, and a magnitude 5.8 earthquake in Virginia that caused infrastructural damage. None of these disasters, bad as they are, rise to the level of the Nepal Earthquake(s) of 2015 in which almost 10,000 lives were lost. They collected a large dataset of tweets and news articles, but then eliminated a large collection of tweets based on clustering. More elimination of tweets led to only 97 linked tweet-news article pairs, which is a small dataset.
@cite_20
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Twitter is often considered to be a useful source of real-time news, potentially replacing newswire for this purpose. But is this true? In this paper, we examine the extent to which news reporting in newswire and Twitter overlap and whether Twitter often reports news faster than traditional newswire providers. In particular, we analyse 77 days worth of tweet and newswire articles with respect to both manually identified major news events and larger volumes of automatically identified news events. Our results indicate that Twitter reports the same events as newswire providers, in addition to a long tail of minor events ignored by mainstream media. However, contrary to popular belief, neither stream leads the other when dealing with major news events, indicating that the value that Twitter can bring in a news setting comes predominantly from increased event coverage, not timeliness of reporting.