How social media text analysis can inform disaster management

Abstract

Digitalization and the rise of social media have led disaster management to the insight that modern information technology will have to play a key role in dealing with a crisis. In this context, the paper introduces a NLP software for social media text analysis that has been developed in cooperation with disaster managers in the European project Slandail. The aim is to show how state-of-the-art techniques from text mining and information extraction can be applied to fulfil the requirements of the end-users. By way of example use cases the capacity of the approach will be demonstrated to make available social media as a valuable source of information for disaster management.