Multi-Task Learning approach to identify sentences with impact and affected location in a disaster news report

Sumanta Banerjee, Shyamapada Mukherjee, Sivaji Bandyopadhyay


Abstract
The first priority of action in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 advocates the understanding of disaster risk by collecting and processing practical information related to disasters. A smart collection may be the compilation of relevant and summarized news articles focused on some key pieces of information such as disaster event type, geographic location(s), and impacts. In this article, a Multi-Task Learning (MTL) based end-to-end model has been developed to perform three related tasks: sentence classification depending on the presence of (1) relevant locations and (2) impact information to generate a summary,and (3) identification of the causes or event types in disaster news. Each of the three tasks is formulated as a multilabel binary classification problem. The results of the proposed MTL model have been compared with three popular transformer models: BERT, RoBERTa, and ALBERT. It is observed that the proposed model showed better performance scores than the other models in most cases.
Anthology ID:
2025.nlp4pi-1.19
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Katherine Atwell, Laura Biester, Angana Borah, Daryna Dementieva, Oana Ignat, Neema Kotonya, Ziyi Liu, Ruyuan Wan, Steven Wilson, Jieyu Zhao
Venues:
NLP4PI | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
229–238
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.nlp4pi-1.19/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.nlp4pi-1.19
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sumanta Banerjee, Shyamapada Mukherjee, and Sivaji Bandyopadhyay. 2025. Multi-Task Learning approach to identify sentences with impact and affected location in a disaster news report. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI), pages 229–238, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Task Learning approach to identify sentences with impact and affected location in a disaster news report (Banerjee et al., NLP4PI 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.nlp4pi-1.19.pdf