Leveraging cross-media analytics to detect events and mine opinions for emergency management

Purpose Timely detection of emergency events and effective tracking of corresponding public opinions are critical in emergency management. As media are immediate sources of information on emergencies, the purpose of this paper is to propose cross-media analytics to detect and track emergency events and provide decision support for government and emergency management departments. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, a novel emergency event detection and opinion mining method is proposed for emergency management using cross-media analytics. In the proposed approach, an event detection module is constructed to discover emergency events based on cross-media analytics, and after the detected event is confirmed as an emergency event, an opinion mining module is used to analyze public sentiments and then generate public sentiment time series for early warning via a semantic expansion technique. Findings Empirical results indicate that a specific emergency can be detected and that public opinion can be tracked effectively and efficiently using cross-media analytics. In addition, the proposed system can be used for decision support and real-time response for government and emergency management departments. Research limitations/implications This paper takes full advantage of cross-media information and proposes novel emergency event detection and opinion mining methods for emergency management using cross-media analytics. The empirical analysis results illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method. Practical implications The proposed method can be applied for detection of emergency events and tracking of public opinions for emergency decision support and governmental real-time response. Originality/value This research work contributes to the design of a decision support system for emergency event detection and opinion mining. In the proposed approaches, emergency events are detected by leveraging cross-media analytics, and public sentiments are measured using an auto-expansion of the domain dictionary in the field of emergency management to eliminate the misclassification of the general dictionary and to make the quantization more accurate.