# Coping with low data availability for social media crisis message categorisation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17211 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17211/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 170 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04747/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08114/) (2017)
- [Zero-shot Text Classification With Generative Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10165/) (2019)
- [A C-LSTM Neural Network for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08630/) (2015)
- [Train Once, Test Anywhere: Zero-Shot Learning for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05972/) (2017)
- [Low Resource Text Classification with ULMFit and Backtranslation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09244/) (2019)
- [Rapid Classification of Crisis-Related Data on Social Networks using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03902/) (2016)
- [STA: Self-controlled Text Augmentation for Improving Text Classifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12784/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

During crisis situations, social media allows people to quickly share information, including messages requesting help. This can be valuable to emergency responders, who need to categorise and prioritise these messages based on the type of assistance being requested. However, the high volume of messages makes it difficult to filter and prioritise them without the use of computational techniques. Fully supervised filtering techniques for crisis message categorisation typically require a large amount of annotated training data, but this can be difficult to obtain during an ongoing crisis and is expensive in terms of time and labour to create. This thesis focuses on addressing the challenge of low data availability when categorising crisis messages for emergency response. It first presents domain adaptation as a solution for this problem, which involves learning a categorisation model from annotated data from past crisis events (source domain) and adapting it to categorise messages from an ongoing crisis event (target domain). In many-to-many adaptation, where the model is trained on multiple past events and adapted to multiple ongoing events, a multi-task learning approach is proposed using pre-trained language models. This approach outperforms baselines and an ensemble approach further improves performance...