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Building Machine Learning Model for Emotional Analysis of Twitter (X) Discourse during Flood Disasters: A Case Study of Chennai, India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2026

Dhivya Karmegam*
Affiliation:
School of Public Health, SRM Institute of Science and Technology , Kattankulathur, Tamil Nadu, 603203, India
Sivakumar Ramamoorthy
Affiliation:
Department of Civil Engineering, SRM Institute of Science and Technology , Kattankulathur, Tamil Nadu, 603203, India
Bagavandas Mappillairaju
Affiliation:
Centre for Statistics, SRM Institute of Science and Technology , Kattankulathur, Tamil Nadu, 603203, India
Raghul Gandhi Venkatesan
Affiliation:
Centre for Statistics, SRM Institute of Science and Technology , Kattankulathur, Tamil Nadu, 603203, India
*
Corresponding author: Dhivya Karmegam; Email: dhivyak@srmist.edu.in
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Abstract

Objective

The aim of this study is to develop disaster specific classification model specific to India, that extracts population emotional states during disasters from geo-referenced social media data. The developed model is also examined considering the case of Chennai floods 2015.

Methods

Using tweets from various disaster situations in India, a domain-specific training corpus was created. After training and testing different machine learning models, the top-performing model was used to classify emotions from tweets collected between November and December 2015 from Chennai. Using QGIS and Z-proportional testing, the spatial and temporal variations of negative emotions were further investigated.

Results

Emotions were extracted from geo-tagged tweets that were posted during the 2015 Chennai floods using the SVM classifier (accuracy: 0.84). The findings revealed that, in comparison to before the flood, there was a significant increase in sadness (23%) and fear (6%) during the disaster. Sadness and disgust decreased in post flood period. Distinct spatiotemporal patterns of emotional expression were identified, which showed clusters of anger in Perungudi, fear in Adyar, and grief and disgust in Teynampet and Sholinganallur zones.

Conclusion

This study remains a proof-of-concept confirming the importance of social media analytics during disasters for directing focused response and recovery activities.

Information

Type
Original Research
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Society for Disaster Medicine and Public Health, Inc
Figure 0

Figure 1. Methodological framework.Figure 1. long description.

Figure 1

Table 1. Results of subjective classificationTable 1. long description.

Figure 2

Table 2. Number and percentage of negative emotion tweets in different time periodsTable 2. long description.

Figure 3

Table 3. Percentage differences in negative emotions with respect to timeTable 3. long description.

Figure 4

Figure 2. Spatial distribution negative emotions (a) pre disaster, (b) during disaster, and (c) post disaster.Figure 2. long description.

Figure 5

Figure 3. Spatial clusters of emotions (a) sad and (b) fear.Figure 3. long description.

Figure 6

Figure 4. Spatial clusters of emotions (a) disgust and (b) anger.Figure 4. long description.

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