Current research project: EDIT
The EDIT (Extraction of Disaster Information from Text) Project, is a collaboration between the CIMA (International Centre on Environmental Monitoring) Research Foundation, Italy, and the University of Nottingham. It runs from 2013-14.
It has the goal of developing methods for extraction of information for disaster information from online natural language (text) sources of various kinds, including newspaper reports, social networking and blogs. The extracted data includes time, location and information about the disaster, that can be used for mapping, risk assessment and prediction, including the damage caused by a given disaster and possible mitigation. The project focusses on flood and earthquake disasters using case studies in New Zealand and Italy, but aims to develop an approach that can be applied to future disasters.
We are using templates for language constructions that are commonly used to describe disasters, together with natural language processing (NLP) techniques, to extract the meaningful elements into a formal database structure which is then mapped and used for analysis. We are also developing a measure to determine data reliability from multiple sources.
Project leads:
Dr Kristin Stock (University of Nottingham)
Dr Stefania Traverso (CIMA Foundation)
Project staff:
Valentina Cerutti