Gold Standard Creation for Microblog Retrieval

Microblogging sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc., are important sources of first-hand accounts during disaster situations, and have the potential to significantly aid disaster relief efforts. The IRMiDis track at FIRE 2017 focused on developing and comparing IR approaches to automatically identify and match tweets that indicate the need or availability of a resource, leading to the creation of a benchmark dataset for future improvements in this task. However, based on our experiments, we argue that the gold standard data obtained in the track is substantially incomplete. We also discuss some reasons why it may have been so, and provide some suggestions for making more robust ground truth data in such tasks.