Rationale Aware Contrastive Learning Based Approach to Classify and Summarize Crisis-Related Microblogs

Authors: Thi Huyen Nguyen and Koustav Rudra

Recent fashion of information propagation on Twitter makes the platform a crucial conduit for tactical data and emergency responses during disasters. However, the real-time information about crises is immersed in a large volume of emotional and irrelevant posts. It brings the necessity to develop an automatic tool to identify disaster-related messages and summarize the information for data consumption and situation planning. Besides, explainability of the methods is crucial in determining their applicability in real-life scenarios. Recent studies also highlight the importance of learning a good latent representation of tweets for several downstream tasks. In this paper, we take advantage of state-of-the-art methods, such as transformers and contrastive learning to build an interpretable classifier. Our proposed model classifies Twitter messages into different humanitarian categories and also extracts rationale snippets as supporting evidence for output decisions. The contrastive learning framework helps to learn better representations of tweets by bringing the related tweets closer in the embedding space. Furthermore, we employ classification labels and rationales to efficiently generate summaries of crisis events. Extensive experiments over different crisis datasets show that (i). our classifier obtains the best performance-interpretability trade-off, (ii). the proposed summarizer shows superior performance (1.4%-22% improvement) with significantly less computation cost than baseline models.