Automatic Matching of Resource Needs and Availabilities in Microblogs for Post-Disaster Relief

Abstract

During a disaster event, it is essential to know about needs and availabilities of different types of resources, for coordinating relief operations. Microblogging sites are frequently used for aiding post-disaster relief operations, and there have been prior attempts to identify tweets that inform about resource needs and availabilities (termed as need-tweets and availability-tweets respectively). However, there has not been much attempt to effectively utilise such tweets. We introduce the problem of automatically matching need-tweets with appropriate availability-tweets, which is practically important for coordination of post-disaster relief operations. We also experiment with several methodologies for automatically matching need-tweets and availability-tweets.