Overview of the FIRE 2022 track: Information Retrieval from Microblogs during Disasters (IRMiDis)

Microblogging sites such as Twitter play an important role in dealing with various mass emergencies including natural disasters and pandemics. Over the last several years, the track on Information Retrieval from Microblogs during Disasters (IRMiDis), organized as part of the FIRE conference series, has provided annotated datasets for developing ML/NLP techniques for utilizing microblogs for various practical tasks that would help authorities better deal with disaster situations. In particular, the FIRE 2022 IRMiDis track focused on two important tasks – (i) to detect the vaccine-related stance of tweets related to COVID-19 vaccines, and (ii) to detect reporting of COVID-19 symptom in tweets.