CrisisBERT: a Robust Transformer for Crisis Classification and Contextual Crisis Embedding

Understand

Classification of crisis events, such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks and pandemics, is a crucial task to create early signals and inform relevant parties for spontaneous actions to reduce overall damage.

• Despite crisis such as natural disasters can be predicted by professional institutions, certain events are first signaled by civilians, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemics.
• Social media platforms such as Twitter often exposes firsthand signals on such crises through high volume information exchange over half a billion tweets posted daily.
• Prior works proposed various crisis embeddings and classification using conventional Machine Learning and Neural Network models.