NARMADA: Need and Available Resource Managing Assistant for Disasters and Adversities

TL;DR

NARMADA is a semi-automated platform that uses social media data and NLP techniques to identify, extract, and match resource needs and availabilities for improved disaster relief coordination.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system that automates the identification and matching of disaster-related resource needs and supplies using crowd-sourced social media data.

Findings

Effective extraction of resource information from microblogs

Successful matching of needs and availabilities

Facilitates resource management during disasters

Abstract

Although a lot of research has been done on utilising Online Social Media during disasters, there exists no system for a specific task that is critical in a post-disaster scenario -- identifying resource-needs and resource-availabilities in the disaster-affected region, coupled with their subsequent matching. To this end, we present NARMADA, a semi-automated platform which leverages the crowd-sourced information from social media posts for assisting post-disaster relief coordination efforts. The system employs Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval techniques for identifying resource-needs and resource-availabilities from microblogs, extracting resources from the posts, and also matching the needs to suitable availabilities. The system is thus capable of facilitating the judicious management of resources during post-disaster relief operations.