Near-real-time Earthquake-induced Fatality Estimation using Crowdsourced Data and Large-Language Models

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel end-to-end framework leveraging large language models and social media data to rapidly and accurately estimate earthquake casualties worldwide, improving upon traditional slow and labor-intensive methods.

Contribution

The authors introduce a multi-component system combining LLM-based casualty extraction, truth discovery, and Bayesian updating to enhance real-time earthquake fatality estimation from multilingual social media.

Findings

Achieves near-real-time casualty estimates comparable to manual USGS methods.

Effectively handles noisy, conflicting social media reports across multiple languages.

Demonstrates improved speed and accuracy in global earthquake fatality estimation.

Abstract

When a damaging earthquake occurs, immediate information about casualties is critical for time-sensitive decision-making by emergency response and aid agencies in the first hours and days. Systems such as Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response (PAGER) by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) were developed to provide a forecast within about 30 minutes of any significant earthquake globally. Traditional systems for estimating human loss in disasters often depend on manually collected early casualty reports from global media, a process that's labor-intensive and slow with notable time delays. Recently, some systems have employed keyword matching and topic modeling to extract relevant information from social media. However, these methods struggle with the complex semantics in multilingual texts and the challenge of interpreting ever-changing, often conflicting reports of death and injury numbers from various unverified sources on social media platforms. In this work, we introduce an end-to-end framework to significantly improve the timeliness and accuracy of global earthquake-induced human loss forecasting using multi-lingual, crowdsourced social media. Our framework integrates (1) a hierarchical casualty extraction model built upon large language models, prompt design, and few-shot learning to retrieve quantitative human loss claims from social media, (2) a physical constraint-aware, dynamic-truth discovery model that discovers the truthful human loss from massive noisy and potentially conflicting human loss claims, and (3) a Bayesian updating loss projection model that dynamically updates the final loss estimation using discovered truths. We test the framework in real-time on a series of global earthquake events in 2021 and 2022 and show that our framework streamlines casualty data retrieval, achieving speed and accuracy comparable to manual methods by USGS.