SAVITR: A System for Real-time Location Extraction from Microblogs during Emergencies

We present SAVITR, a system that leverages the information posted on the Twitter microblogging site to monitor and analyse emergency situations. Given that only a very small percentage of microblogs are geo-tagged, it is essential for such a system to extract locations from the text of the microblogs. We employ natural language processing techniques to infer the locations mentioned in the microblog text, in an unsupervised fashion and display it on a map-based interface. The system is designed for efficient performance, achieving an F-score of 0.79, and is approximately two orders of magnitude faster than other available tools for location extraction.