Using AI and Social Media Multimodal Content for Disaster Response and Management: Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Directions

TLDR: Various applications and opportunities of SM multimodal data, latest advancements, current challenges, and future directions for the crisis informatics and other related research fields are highlighted.

Abstract: People increasingly use Social Media (SM) platforms such as Twitter and Facebook during disasters and emergencies to post situational updates including reports of injured or dead people, infrastructure damage, requests of urgent needs, and the like. Information on SM comes in many forms, such as textual messages, images, and videos. Several studies have shown the utility of SM information for disaster response and management, which encouraged humanitarian organizations to start incorporating SM data sources into their workflows. However, several challenges prevent these organizations from using SM data for response efforts. These challenges include near-real-time information processing, information overload, information extraction, summarization, and verification of both textual and visual content. We highlight various applications and opportunities of SM multimodal data, latest advancements, current challenges, and future directions for the crisis informatics and other related research fields.