Understanding the Behavior of Filipino Twitter Users during Disaster

The Philippines is a country that frequentlyexperiences disasters, such as typhoons. During these events,many citizens spread information and communicate with eachother through social media like Twitter. This study aims to takeadvantage of that fact by analyzing the data from social media toget some insights on the situation. Specifically, this paper studiesthe behavior of Filipinos on Twitter during a disaster, and tries tosee the differences between participants, or the direct victims ofthe disaster, and observers. The study used Latent DirichletAllocation and Principal Component Analysis to extract thedifferent topics discussed during a disaster, and found out whichtopics participants are more likely to talk about. Results also showwhich topics are more likely to be retweeted, which languageparticipants in disaster use more often, and what emotions arepresent in the disaster-time tweets of Filipinos