# UCD-CS at TREC 2021 Incident Streams Track

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.03737 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03737/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [Towards Zero-Label Language Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09193/) (2021)
- [Processing Social Media Messages in Mass Emergency: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.7071/) (2014)
- [Transformer-based Multi-task Learning for Disaster Tweet Categorisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08010/) (2021)
- [Multi-task transfer learning for finding actionable information from crisis-related messages on social media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13395/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, the task of mining important information from social media posts during crises has become a focus of research for the purposes of assisting emergency response (ES). The TREC Incident Streams (IS) track is a research challenge organised for this purpose. The track asks participating systems to both classify a stream of crisis-related tweets into humanitarian aid related information types and estimate their importance regarding criticality. The former refers to a multi-label information type classification task and the latter refers to a priority estimation task. In this paper, we report on the participation of the University College Dublin School of Computer Science (UCD-CS) in TREC-IS 2021. We explored a variety of approaches, including simple machine learning algorithms, multi-task learning techniques, text augmentation, and ensemble approaches. The official evaluation results indicate that our runs achieve the highest scores in many metrics. To aid reproducibility, our code is publicly available at https://github.com/wangcongcong123/crisis-mtl.