Detecting Emergency Situations by Inferring Locations in Twitter

Abstract

Most methods to detect emergency situations using Twitter rely on keywords. The problem with keywordbased methods is the need for training in specific domains for different types of events, for example: earthquakes, typhoons, terrorist attacks, tornadeos, etc. In contrast, our proposal uses the recurring mention of a country-locations in microblogging messages to identify such events without using keywords and characterize through of inter-arrival times the urgency of situation.