Cross-Lingual Dataset of Crisis-Related Social Media

The cross-lingual natural disaster dataset includes public tweets collected using Twitter’s public API, filtering by location-related keywords and date, without using any additional filtering (e.g., we did not restrict the query to specific languages). We considered five disaster events between January 2020 and February 2021 that received substantial news coverage internationally. All messages include a “language” field computed by Twitter us ing a language detection model developed specifically for tweets. We counted the number of messages per language in each event. Three of the top languages were common to all the studied events: English (ISO 639-1 code: en), Spanish (es), and French (fr). Additionally, we found several hundred messages for each event in other languages, including Catalan (ca), Tagalog (tl), Croatian (hr), German (de), Japanese (ja), Indonesian (id), and Portuguese (pt). After collecting the data, we labelled tweets or their translation to English that contained potentially informative factual information. We name this group of tweets “informative messages.” Next, we used crowdsourcing to further categorize the messages into various informational categories. We asked three different workers to label each of the approximately 5,700 informative messages across languages. The target categories were based on an ontology from TREC-IS 2018, where we grouped some low level ontology categories into higher-level ones.