Author(s): Watin Thanathanphon; Narongrit Luangdilok; Ticha Lolupiman; Apimook Mooktaree; Sathit Chantip; Theerapol Charoensuk; Kachapond Chettanawanit; Piyamarn Sisomphon

Linked Author(s): Narongrit Luangdilok, Watin Thanathanphon

Keywords: Flood; Social media; Crowdsourcing; Twitter; Natural Language Processing

Abstract: Social media has great potential for communication channels during disasters and allows people to act as human sensors by communicating with each other what they are experiencing. The extensive usage of social media makes it possible to obtain useful crowdsourcing data. With the advancement of the internet and mobile devices, people are not only users of geographic information but also provide it which is called volunteered geographic information (VGI). During flood events, people use social media platforms to collect and share flood data. The shared multimedia e. g., messages, images, and videos taken during flood events are valuable realtime information and can be used to estimate the flood magnitude, damage, and impacts for flood situations. The development of a fully automated system to scrap flood-related tweets using Twitter API which was selected from reliable Twitter users both of government and private agencies for accuracy and trustworthiness of data collection. In addition, the system uses Thai Natural Language Processing (Thai NLP) on handling large volumes of unstructured data from Twitter to extract, cleanse, and filter flood-related tweets that match with specific keywords and uses Google Geocoding API for the process of transforming a description of a location in tweets into geographic coordinates to identify spatial information of flood events were reported from Twitter. The combining various advanced technologies, there is an opportunity to gather social media data and disseminate flood information into a web-based application to monitor and assess flood hazards, communicate with people in real-time, and use as a tool for flood warning and management.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3850/978-90-833476-1-5_iahr40wc-p0795-cd

Year: 2023