Multilingual analysis of Twitter news in support of mass emergency events

Social media are increasingly becoming a source for event-based early warning systems in the sense that they can help to detect natural disasters and support crisis management during or after disasters. In this work-in-progress paper we study the problems of analyzing multilingual twitter feeds for emergency events. The present work focuses on English as "lingua franca" and on under-resourced Mediterranean languages in endangered zones, particularly Turkey, Greece, and Romania Generally, as local civil protection authorities and the population are likely to respond in their native language. We investigated ten earthquake events and defined four language-specific classifiers that can be used to detect earthquakes by filtering out irrelevant messages that do not relate to the event. The final goal is to extend this work to more Mediterranean languages and to classify and extract relevant information from tweets, translating the main keywords into English. Preliminary results indicate that such a filter has the potential to confirm forecast parameters of tsunami affecting coastal areas where no tide gauges exist and could be integrated into seismographic sensor networks.