Skip to main content
Article
Toward Tweet-Mining Framework for Extracting Terrorist Attack-Related Information and Reporting
IEEE Access
  • Farkhund Iqbal, Zayed University
  • Rabia Batool, Zayed University
  • Benjamin C. M. Fung, McGill University
  • Saiqa Aleem, Zayed University
  • Ahmed Abbasi, Air University Islamabad
  • Abdul Rehman Javed, Air University Islamabad
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2021
Abstract

The widespread popularity of social networking is leading to the adoption of Twitter as an information dissemination tool. Existing research has shown that information dissemination over Twitter has a much broader reach than traditional media and can be used for effective post-incident measures. People use informal language on Twitter, including acronyms, misspelled words, synonyms, transliteration, and ambiguous terms. This makes incident-related information extraction a non-trivial task. However, this information can be valuable for public safety organizations that need to respond in an emergency. This paper proposes an early event-related information extraction and reporting framework that monitors Twitter streams synthesizes event-specific information, e.g., a terrorist attack, and alerts law enforcement, emergency services, and media outlets. Specifically, the proposed framework, Tweet-to-Act (T2A), employs word embedding to transform tweets into a vector space model and then utilizes the Word Mover's Distance (WMD) to cluster tweets for the identification of incidents. To extract reliable and valuable information from a large dataset of short and informal tweets, the proposed framework employs sequence labeling with bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory based Recurrent Neural Networks (bLSTM-RNN). Extensive experimental results suggest that our proposed framework, T2A, outperforms other state-of-the-art methods that use vector space modeling and distance calculation techniques, e.g., Euclidean and Cosine distance. T2A achieves an accuracy of 96% and an F1-score of 86.2% on real-life datasets.

Publisher
IEEE
Keywords
  • Social networking (online),
  • Blogs,
  • Terrorism,
  • Data mining,
  • Feature extraction,
  • Media,
  • Monitoring,
  • Terrorist attacks,
  • news,
  • word embedding,
  • word mover's distance,
  • recurrent neural network,
  • information extraction,
  • bidirectional long short-term memory
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Indexed in Scopus
No
Open Access
Yes
Open Access Type
Gold: This publication is openly available in an open access journal/series
Citation Information
Farkhund Iqbal, Rabia Batool, Benjamin C. M. Fung, Saiqa Aleem, et al.. "Toward Tweet-Mining Framework for Extracting Terrorist Attack-Related Information and Reporting" IEEE Access Vol. 9 (2021) p. 115535 - 115547 ISSN: <a href="https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/id/publication/issn/2169-3536" target="_blank">2169-3536</a>
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/saiqa-alemm/17/