Text Analytics for Resilience-Enabled Extreme EventsReconnaissance

Alicia Y. Tsai, Selim Gunay, Minjune Hwang, Pengyuan Zhai, Chenglong Li, Laurent El Ghaoui, Khalid M. Mosalam

Abstract: Post-hazard reconnaissance for natural disasters (e.g., earthquakes) is important for understanding the performance of the built environment, speeding up the recovery, enhancing resilience and making informed decisions related to current and future hazards. Natural language processing (NLP) is used in this study for the purposes of increasing the accuracy and efficiency of natural hazard reconnaissance through automation. The study particularly focuses on (1) automated data (news and social media) collection hosted by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center server, (2) automatic generation of reconnaissance reports, and (3) use of social media to extract post-hazard information such as the recovery time. Obtained results are encouraging for further development and wider usage of various NLP methods in natural hazard reconnaissance.