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

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 resourceavailabilities 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.