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Abstract |
This paper approaches the problem of monitoring the impact of the disasters by mining web sources for the events, caused by these disasters. We refer to these disaster effects as “micro-events”. Micro-events typically following a large disaster include casualties, damage on infrastructures, vehicles, services and resource supply, as well as relief operations. We present natural language grammar learning algorithms which form the basis for building micro-event detection systems from data, with no or minor human intervention, and we show how they can be applied to mainstream news and social media for monitoring disaster impact. We also experimented with applying statistical classifiers to distill, from social media situational updates on disasters, eyewitness reports from directly affected people. Finally, we describe a Twitter mining robot, which integrates some of these monitoring techniques and is intended to serve as a multilingual content hub for enhancing situational awareness. |
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