Understanding the Behavior of Filipino Twitter Users during Disaster

Abstract

The Philippines is a country that frequently
experiences disasters, such as typhoons. During these events,
many citizens spread information and communicate with each
other through social media like Twitter. This study aims to take
advantage of that fact by analyzing the data from social media to
get some insights on the situation. Specifically, this paper studies
the behavior of Filipinos on Twitter during a disaster, and tries to
see the differences between participants, or the direct victims of
the disaster, and observers. The study used Latent Dirichlet
Allocation and Principal Component Analysis to extract the
different topics discussed during a disaster, and found out which
topics participants are more likely to talk about. Results also show
which topics are more likely to be retweeted, which language
participants in disaster use more often, and what emotions are
present in the disaster-time tweets of Filipinos.