Rescue Activity for the Great East Japan Earthquake Based on a Website that Extracts Rescue Requests from the Net

Abstract

At the early phase of the Great East Japan Earthquake a vast number of tweets were made on Twitter. Even though many of them were calling for emergency rescue, they were not found timely due to the vast number of tweets including well-intentioned tweets to support those emergency rescues. In order to deal with the situation, the authors developed and launched a website on March 16, 2011, which automatically extracts rescue requests, categorizes similar statements into several statements and then lists them. This paper covers in detail not only the technology of the system but also how it has already collaborated and been applied to #99japan, a project to support delivering emergency rescue requests. Note that #99japan is an activity to monitor the process of the rescue based on Twitter and coming from the thread started by temporary volunteers who organized on a Japanese textboard 2 ͪΌΜͶΔ “2chan-nel.”