Microblog retrieval in a disaster situation: A new test collection for evaluation

Abstract

Microblogging sites are important sources of situational information during disaster situations. Hence it is important to design and evaluate Information Retrieval (IR) systems that retrieve information from microblogs during disaster situations. The primary contribution of this paper is to develop a test collection for evaluating IR systems for microblog retrieval in disaster situations. The collection consists of about 50,000 microblogs posted during the Nepal earthquake in April 2015, a set of five topics (information needs) that are practically important during a disaster, and the gold standard annotations of which microblogs are relevant to each topic. We also present some IR models that can be suitable in this evaluation setup, including a standard language model based retrieval, and word embedding based retrieval. We find that the term embedding based retrieval performs better for short, noisy microblogs.