All in a twitter: Self-tuning strategies for a deeper understanding of a crisis tweet collection

Natural disasters have become more frequent during the past 20 years due to significant climate changes. These natural events are hotly debated on social networks like Twitter and a huge amount of short text messages are continuously and promptly exchanged with personal opinions, descriptions of the natural events and their corresponding consequences. The analysis of these large and complex data could help policy-makers to better understand the event as well as to set priorities. However, the correct configuration of the tweet mining process is still challenging due to variable data distribution and the availability of a large number of algorithms with different specific parameters. The analyst need to perform a large number of experiments to identify the best configuration for the overall knowledge discovery process. Innovative, scalable, and parameter-free solutions need to be explored to streamline the analytics process. This paper presents an enhanced version of PASTA (a distributed self-tuning engine) applied to a crisis tweet collection to group a corpus of tweets into cohesive and well-separated clusters with minimal analyst intervention. Experimental results performed on real data collected during natural disasters show the effectiveness of PASTA in discovering interesting groups of correlated tweets without selecting neither the algorithms nor their parameters.