Main work performed throughout the project can be summarised as follows:
- Requirements gathering and evaluation: We thoroughly examined literature on resilience, and the role of communities and information, and gathered extensive requirements from communities through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and workshops, and launched several evaluation exercises of the COMRADES platform and tools.
- Veracity and informativeness: COMRADES researched and developed various analysis tools to process textual reports, and to measure their veracity and informativeness. We developed and released a social media version of YODIE; a tool for multilingual information extraction that is designed for named entity recognition, disambiguation and linking. Also developed a tool for classifying informativeness and actionability, named EMINA (Emergent Informativeness and Actionability), and another tool for measuring veracity. Both tools are integrated into the COMRADES platform.
- Crises data analysis: COMRADES developed tools for classifying crisis-related information based on relevancy and event types. We constructed a three-tier ontology DoRES (Document-Report-Event-Situation) for representing information on crisis-related events, and researched, developed, and integrated a Crisis Event Extraction Service (CREES); a semantic deep-learning method for automatically detecting crisis-related events in social media data. We also experimented with novel designs of models for automatically classifying crisis information that can be trained on data about certain types of crises, and languages, and applied to other crises and languages. Furthermore, we also experiment with different approaches for matching crisis event content.
- COMRADES platform: The platform forms an extension of the Ushahidi platform, by integrating it with the tools above. The platform is available on Github, and fully integrates YODIE, EMINA, and Veracity services from, and CREES, and meets the main requirements gathered in the project. Platform evaluation was performed and documented in several deliverables.
- Dissemination, exploitation, and communication: Overall the project published more than 30 scientific articles in peer reviewed conferences and journals. And launched several workshops, newsletters, and public engagement events.
The main exploitable results of COMRADES are:
- CREES - An advanced Artificial Intelligent (A.I.) method that identifies crisis events in social media streams which is called Crisis Event Extraction Service (CREES). CREES is available as an integrated component in the COMRADES platform, but also as an API and as a Google Sheet plugin (
https://tinyurl.com/y67523rf(öffnet in neuem Fenster)).
- Informativeness classifier for social media posts - The classifier filters the deluge of data on social media and selects which messages are more informative and which are more actionable (
https://github.com/GateNLP/emina(öffnet in neuem Fenster)).
- Entity finder for social media posts - The tool automatically identify entities in given posts, to help digital responders and others to very quickly learn about the locations, organisations, and other entities mentioned in the post.
https://gate.ac.uk/applications/yodie.html(öffnet in neuem Fenster)- Veracity classifier for social media messages - Automatic method for calculating the probable veracity level of a given message. This tool is designed to help users with assessing the veracity of messages posted in social media, such as in Twitter. It is deployed as a service (
https://cloud.gate.ac.uk/shopfront/displayItem/rumour-veracity(öffnet in neuem Fenster)).
- Ushahidi platform that allows organizations to gather information, incidents, and reports from people on the ground, gain situational awareness, and then respond more efficiently and effectively. A “deployment” in Ushahidi’s context is a hosted instance of the Ushahidi Platform. Ushahidi has created a COMRADES deployment for use by the consortium partners that is accessible at:
https://comrades.ushahidi.com(öffnet in neuem Fenster).
