Abstract

We present AIDR (Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response), a platform designed to perform automatic classification of crisis-related microblog communications. AIDR enables humans and machines to work together to apply human intelligence to large-scale data at high speed. The objective of AIDR is to classify messages that people post during disasters into a set of user-defined categories of information (e.g., "needs", "damage", etc.) For this purpose, the system continuously ingests data from Twitter, processes it (i.e., using machine learning classification techniques) and leverages human-participation (through crowdsourcing) in real-time. AIDR has been successfully tested to classify informative vs. non-informative tweets posted during the 2013 Pakistan Earthquake. Overall, we achieved a classification quality (measured using AUC) of 80%. AIDR is available at http://aidr.qcri.org/.