Week 2: Ziplining to Benchmark Creation

The first two days of this week I was 4000 miles away in a foreign country: Costa Rica. Despite all of the fun activities like ziplining and whitewater river rafting, I am happy to be back working on this project!

Last week, I finished looking through Resource 2 from CrisisNLP and just began working on the massive 50k tweet dataset: Resource 6. This week, I continued gathering relevant question tweets from Resource 6. Some of my newly collected tweets include the following:

“Are local shelters open for people with pets? #Harvey,” “Water in short supply? #Harvey. Where else can we get some?,” and “Is it too late to board up windows? #Harvey.”

Though gathering relevant questions is quite monotonous, this step is arguably the most vital for my project’s completion. Now that the benchmark has well above 200 questions, I shall not be going through the remaining tens of thousands of questions remaining in Resource 6. Next time, I plan to refine each question, remove repetitive ones, and start translating the questions into Spanish!

I look forward to my future progress and hope you all are as well!