Twitter has become an important communication channel in times of emergency.
The ubiquitousness of smartphones enables people to announce an emergency they’re observing in real-time. Because of this, more agencies are interested in programatically monitoring Twitter (i.e. disaster relief organizations and news agencies).
But, it’s not always clear whether a person’s words are actually announcing a disaster.
This project aims to use natural language processing to predict which tweets are about real disasters and which ones are not.