Abstract
Disasters may cause a variety of health problems in the victim population, and public health authorities are forced to assess such situations rapidly in order to take appropriate countermeasures. This process may involve the processing of numerous unstructured texts, and hence, natural language processing (NLP) has significant application potential in the field of crisis response. This report classifies the information related to public health in a crisis situation into three categories—victims, victim groups, and care providers—and summarizes the characteristics of these categories to clarify the tasks suitable for NLP. This analysis is followed by three case studies of the Great East Japan Earthquake response. These case studies illustrate the contribution of NLP in an actual health crisis and suggest that the authorities do not possess appropriate means to process the texts that may accumulate in such a situation. The archive of the earthquake would be the best source for the analysis to prepare for future disasters.
