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WildFireCan-MMD: A Multimodal Dataset for Classification of User-Generated Content During Wildfires in Canada
Braeden Sherritt, Isar Nejadgholi, Marzieh Amini
Rapid information access is vital during wildfires, yet traditional data sources are slow and costly. Social media offers real-time updates, but extracting relevant insights remains a challenge. We present WildFireCan-MMD, a new multimodal dataset of X posts from recent Canadian wildfires, annotated across twelve key themes. Evaluating both vision-language models and custom-trained classifiers, we show that while zero-shot prompting offers quick deployment, even simple trained models outperform them when labelled data is available. Our best-performing transformer-based fine-tuned model reaches 83% f-score, outperforming gpt4 by 23%. As a use case, we demonstrate how this model can be used to uncover trends during wildfires. Our findings highlight the enduring importance of tailored datasets and task-specific training. Importantly, such datasets should be localized, as disaster response requirements vary across regions and contexts.
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