Detecting Event-Related Tweets by Example using Few-Shot Models

Social media sources can be helpful in crisis situations, but discovering relevant messages is not trivial. Methods have so far focused on universal detection models for all kinds of crises or for certain crisis types (e.g. floods). Event-specific models could implement a more focused search area, but collecting data and training new models for a crisis that is already in progress is costly and may take too much time for a prompt response. As a compromise, manually collecting a small amount of example messages is feasible. Few-shot models can generalize to unseen classes with such a small handful of examples, and do not need be trained anew for each event. We show how these models can be used to detect crisis-relevant tweets during new events with just 10 to 100 examples and counterexamples. We also propose a new type of few-shot model that does not require counterexamples.