Safety Information Mining - What can NLP do in a disaster -

This paper describes efforts of NLP researchers to create a system to aid the relief efforts during the 2011 East Japan Earthquake. Specifically, we created a system to mine information regarding the safety of people in the disaster-stricken area from Twitter, a massive yet highly unorganized information source. We describe the large scale collaborative effort to rapidly create robust and effective systems for word segmentation, named entity recognition, and tweet classification. As a result of our efforts, we were able to effectively deliver new information about the safety of over 100 people in the disasterstricken area to a central repository for safety information.