Domain-specific sentiment analysis for tweets during hurricanes (DSSA-H): A domain-adversarial neural-network-based approach

Hurricanes are one of the most frequent and destructive disasters in the United States. The events are large scale and have relatively long-term impacts. Social networking platforms such as Twitter can provide real-time information for disaster managers and affected populations during large-scale disasters (e.g., hurricanes), but extracting useful information and interpreting data accurately for disaster management is still challenging. Sentiment analysis of social media data helps detect the concerns of affected people and understand individuals' responses on the ground at unprecedented scales, but the method is known to be domain-dependent. The same words or expressions can indicate opposite sentiments in different domains. This paper proposes a domain-specific sentiment analysis approach specifically for tweets posted during hurricanes (DSSA-H). DSSA-H can retrieve hurricane-relevant tweets with a trained supervised-learning classifier, Random Forest (RF), and classify the sentiment of hurricane-relevant tweets based on a domain-adversarial neural network (DANN). We built a dataset of tweets posted during six recent hurricanes and applied the DSSA-H approach for sentiment analysis. After evaluation, we found that each classifier (i.e., RF and DANN) outperforms baseline classifiers and that DSSA-H outperforms two high-performing general sentiment classification approaches when classifying sentiments of tweets posted during hurricanes. We also applied DSSA-H in examining sentiment patterns across six recent hurricanes in the U.S. This domain-specific sentiment analysis approach can be used by the first responders and affected communities to more accurately and rapidly detect crises and emergent events, allocate resources, and assess disaster's impact during hurricanes. DSSA-H contributes to an intelligent and adaptive disaster information system for the data-rich human and the built environment system.