Analyzing the Seven Critical Elements of Life Recovery Using News: A Case Study of the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake

Abstract

A significant earthquake impacted the Noto Peninsula on January 1, 2024, and recovery efforts have been ongoing since then. News media articles offer valuable perspectives on the recovery process. To better understand the recovery situation and its evolution from a news media perspective, this study analyzes Yahoo! Japan News articles on the Noto Peninsula earthquake posted between August 2024 and July 2025. Using natural language processing (NLP) by keyword-based and Generative Pre-trained Transformer-based approaches with statistical analysis, the Seven Critical Elements of Life Recovery, as well as sentiments and city names, are identified in the articles. Further studies, including one-way analysis of variance with Tukey’s honestly significant difference test and ordinary least squares regression, are conducted to identify differences and changes in volume and sentiment toward recovery elements and locations. Results reveal that both the volume and sentiment vary across recovery elements and differ between cities. However, most cases do not demonstrate a significant trend in either volume or sentiment over time. This suggests that there may be diversity in recovery-related news coverage within the affected region, while most exhibit no changes or linear trends. Overall, this study develops a process to extract structured disaster recovery data from news texts using NLP, providing a comprehensive understanding of disaster recovery in the Noto Peninsula from a news perspective.