Improving accident statistics: the role of social media.

Road safety is a critical issue for Thailand. In 2013, we were ranked the third in terms of high road accident fatality rate according to the World Health Organization [9] and ranked the sixth from World Life Expectancy website [10]. ThaiRSC, Thai Road Accident Data Center for Road Safety Culture, reported that there are 27,627 accidents occurred in Bangkok Area in 2014 [5]. To examine the completeness of an official road accident report from ThaiRSC, we collected road accident reports from an independent and voluntary source, i.e. Twitter, via our natural language processing system, Traffy, and then compared with ThaiRSC source. The result shows that only 1.5% of the reports appear on both ThaiRSC and Twitter. This indicates that data from both sources could significantly complement each other and researchers using ThaiRSC source should be aware that single source of information may not be accurate in terms of completeness.