Rumour detection on social media for crisis management

We address the problem of making sense of rumour evolution during crises and emergencies. We study how understanding and capturing emerging rumours can benefit decision makers during such event. To this end, we propose a two-step framework for detecting rumours during crises. In the first step, we introduce an algorithm to identify noteworthy sub-events in real time. In the second step, we introduce a graph-based text ranking method for summarising newsworthy sub-events while events unfold. We use temporal and content-based features to achieve the effective and real-time response and management of crises situations. These features can improve efficiency in the detection of key rumours in the context of a real-world application. The effectiveness of our method is evaluated over large-scale Twitter data related to real-world crises. The results show that our framework can efficiently and effectively capture key rumours circulated during natural and human-made disasters.