Enable tweet-geolocation and don’t drive ERTs crazy! Improving situational awareness using Twitter

Abstract

When traditional communication services are down during an emergency event, Twitter has proven to provide first-hand information to emergency response teams. The lack of geotagged tweets complicates these teams labour when trying to pin-point the events on a map. A rapid identification of situational awareness on incidents may help reduce the number of casualties and damages thanks to an efficient management. In this paper, we present a new approach to improve geolocation accuracy in Twitter posts, relying on NLP techniques and online geolocation APIs, providing the most trusted event location from a Twitter stream.