Local community situational awareness during an emergency

With the recent exponential growth in the use of public forums for communication and sharing of information, emergency response organisations are realising that there is a potential to exploit these forums to extract information to improve the overall awareness of the events that occur during an emergency. This paper describes an approach using information extraction, topic and event identification and its application in a case study. The results indicate that despite the ill-formed, variable quality and conversational nature of forum posts a degree of coherent event information can be acquired.