Understanding the Behavior of Filipino Twitter Users during Disaster

Abstract

The Philippines is a country that frequently experiences disasters, such as typhoons. During these events, many citizens spread information and communicate with each other through social media like Twitter. This study aims to take advantage of that fact by analyzing the data from social media to get some insights on the situation. Specifically, this paper studies the behavior of Filipinos on Twitter during a disaster, and tries to see the differences between participants, or the direct victims of the disaster, and observers. The study used Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Principal Component Analysis to extract the different topics discussed during a disaster, and found out which topics participants are more likely to talk about. Results also show which topics are more likely to be retweeted, which language participants in disaster use more often, and what emotions are present in the disaster-time tweets of Filipinos.

Discovering Insights via Hybrid Thematic Analysis: A Case Study on Disaster Risk Reduction and Management for Legazpi City, Albay

“…Using NLP techniques for thematic analysis has become increasingly popular in recent years. In the paper of [5], the researchers analyze the behavior of Filipino Twitter users using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Principal Component Analysis to extract the different topics discussed during a disaster. The study highlights that Filipino Twitter users shared various information related to the disaster, including updates on the disaster's progression, personal experiences, and calls for help.…”

“…There have been several applications of NLP-based analysis in disaster-related phenomena, including using NLP on social media analytics, as vast amounts of information is generated in social networking platforms during disasters. The studies [4]- [5] implemented NLP techniques to analyze disaster-related tweets from Twitter, understanding behavior and obtaining valuable insights from the citizens in real-time. Similarly, the work [6] performed sentiment analysis on disaster-related tweets, which enabled an understanding of the public's emotions and opinions.…”

Disease and Social Media in Post-Natural Disaster Recovery Philippines

“…Coined the social media capital of the world, the Philippines provides a perfect opportunity to evaluate the potential of social media use in disease surveillance [14]. The objectives of this research are:…”

Social Media Analytics for Post-Disasters Disease Detection in the Philippines

“…Consequently, these conditions are a perfect venue for communicable disease transmission and have been proposed to cause disease outbreaks weeks after the original disaster occurred. Coined the social media capital of the world 1 , the Philippines provides a perfect opportunity to evaluate the potential of social media use in disease surveillance.…”