Finding Incident-Related Social Media Messages for Emergency Awareness

An information retrieval framework is proposed which searches for incident-related social media messages in an automated fashion. Using P2000 messages as an input for this framework and by extracting location information from text, using simple natural language processing techniques, a search for incident-related messages is conducted. A machine learned ranker is trained to create an ordering of the retrieved messages, based on their relevance. This provides an easy accessible interface for emergency response managers to aid them in their decision making process.