=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1832/SMERP-2017-keynote-talk-McCreadie
|storemode=property
|title=None
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1832/SMERP-2017-keynote-talk-McCreadie.pdf
|volume=Vol-1832
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==None==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1832/SMERP-2017-keynote-talk-McCreadie.pdf
Summarizing the Situation with Social Media Streams
Richard McCreadie1
1 School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, UK
Richard.Mccreadie@glasgow.ac.uk
Abstract. When a crisis hits, it is important for response agencies to quickly
determine the situation on the ground, such that they can deploy the limited
resources at their disposal as quickly and effectively as possible. However, during an
emergency, information is difficult to come-by, as response units often need to arrive
on the scene before the severity of the situation can be estimated. On the other hand,
during emergencies, the general public is gravitating to social media platforms to ask
for assistance and to show what they see to their friends. As such, emergency
services are increasingly interested in technologies that can extract relevant
information from social media during an emergency, to aid situational awareness.
Meanwhile, real-time summarization is an emerging field that aims to build timeline
summaries of events that are happening in the world, using news and social media
streams as sensors. In this talk, I will provide an overview of what types of
information emergency services want to extract from social media, and how real-
time summarization systems can help achieve this. Furthermore, I will discuss
current technologies and techniques for real-time summarization that are relevant to
the crisis domain, along with the challenges that are yet to be solved .
Brief Biography: Dr. Richard McCreadie is a researcher within the Information
Retrieval (IR) Group at the University of Glasgow, UK. He is an IR specialist, as well
as developer and manager for the Terrier open source IR platform, which has been
downloaded over 40,000 times since 2004. His research is focused on the interface
between streaming IR and social media, tackling topics such as: information retrieval
architectures for real-time stream processing; leveraging social media for event
sensing (detecting events, extracting knowledge and summarizing those events); and
evaluation methodologies for streaming IR. He has spent the last three years working
on real-time event detection, summarization and search technologies for use during
emergencies within EU FP7 SUPER Project (Social sensors for secUrity assessments
and Proactive EmeRgencies management). Furthermore, he works with researchers
and industry partners around the world to advance the IR field as co-chair of the real-
time streaming summarization evaluation initiatives (2014-Present) at the Text
Retrieval Conference (TREC).