Social media text mining and network analysis for decision support in natural crisis management

A core issue in crisis management is to extract from the mass of incoming information what is important for situational awareness during mass emergencies. Based on a case study we develop a prototypical application, TweetComp1, which is integrated into the decision-support component of a Tsunami early warning system and demonstrates the applicability of our approach. This paper describes four novel approaches using focused twitter crawling, trustworthiness analysis, geo-parsing, and multilingual tweet classification in the context of how they could be used for monitoring crises. The validity of our state-of-the art text mining and network analysis technologies will be verified in different experiments based on a human annotated gold standard corpus.