Introducing a framework for automatically differentiating witness accounts of events from social media

Identifying Witnesses of events from social media is an opportunity to crowdsource real-time information to enhance numerous applications including emergency response in a crisis, filtering sources for journalism, and enhancing marketing services. Using a sporting event broadcast live to a proportionally much larger audience, this research demonstrates a significant increase in the number of Witnesses identified posting from the event venue, in comparison to the number identified from geotags alone. This is achieved by considering the text and image content of micro-blogs as additional evidence. This paper also reports progress towards the automatic categorisation of the additional text and image evidence, and modelling and testing this evidence for corroboration or conflict, using Dempster-Shafter Theory of Evidence.