Developing a Sina Weibo Incident Monitor for Disasters

This paper presents ongoing work to develop an earthquake detector based on near-real-time microblog messages from China. The system filters earthquake related keywords from Sina Weibo messages available on the public timeline and uses a classifier to determine if the messages correspond to people experiencing an earthquake. We describe how the classifier has been established and report preliminary results of successfully using it as a detector for earthquake events in China. We also provide an overview of how we have accessed messages in Chinese from Sina Weibo, including a summary of their structure and content. We note our experience of processing this text with Natural Language Processing packages and describe a preliminary web site for users to view the processed messages. Our long term aim is to develop a general alert and monitoring system for various disaster event types in China reported by the public on Sina Weibo. This first case study provides a working example from which an ‘all hazards’ system can be developed over time.