Purohit, HemantCastillo, CarlosPandey, Rahul2020-07-302020-07-302020Purohit H, Castillo C, Pandey R. Ranking and grouping social media requests for emergency services using serviceability model. Soc Netw Anal Min. 2020;10:22. DOI: 10.1007/s13278-020-0633-31869-5450http://hdl.handle.net/10230/45222Social media has become an alternative communication mechanism for the public to reach out to emergency services during time-sensitive events. However, the information overload of social media experienced by these services, coupled with their limited human resources, challenges them to timely identify, prioritize, and organize critical requests for help. In this paper, we frst present a formal model of serviceability called Social-EOC, which describes the elements of a serviceable message posted in social media expressing a request. Using the serviceability model, we then describe a system for the discovery and ranking of highly serviceable requests as well as for re-ranking requests by semantic grouping to reduce redundancy and facilitate the browsing of requests by responders. We validate the model for emergency services by experimenting with six crisis event datasets and ground truth provided by emergency professionals. Our experiments demonstrate that features based on both serviceability model and social connectedness improve the performance of discovering and ranking (nDCG gain up to 25%) service requests over diferent baselines. We also empirically validate the existence of redundancy and semantic coherence among the serviceable requests using our semantic grouping approach, which shows the signifcance and need for grouping similar requests to save the time of emergency services. Thus, an application of serviceability model could reduce cognitive load on emergency servicers in fltering, ranking, and organizing public requests on social media at scale.application/pdfeng© The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13278-020-0633-3Information overloadServiceabilitySocial mediaEmergency managementSemantic groupinginfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess