Detecting emotions in communication via social media during crisis events

Abstract

Social media play an important role in crisis events. People in crisis events can report their observations of the crisis environment, and their mental and physical state. They can ask for help or assistance via Twitter. Some studies report, that some or a lot of compassion, concern and empathy is involved. Verification of this thesis was the main concern of our research. We analyzed huge datasets of Tweets available via Internet of recorded messages posted during natural disaster events. We detected many emotional tweets characterized by keywords. Emotional keywords were extracted and composed in an emotional dictionary, to be used for future flooding disasters.