# Extracting Disaster Impacts and Impact Related Locations in Social Media Posts Using Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21753 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21753/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 105 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)
- [Neural Architectures for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01360/) (2016)
- [A Survey of Hallucination in Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05922/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11495/) (2023)
- [Why Language Models Hallucinate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04664/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models for Generative Information Extraction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17617/) (2023)
- [GPT-NER: Named Entity Recognition via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10428/) (2023)
- [GLiNER: Generalist Model for Named Entity Recognition using Bidirectional Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08526/) (2023)
- [Processing Social Media Messages in Mass Emergency: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.7071/) (2014)
- [Twitter as a Lifeline: Human-annotated Twitter Corpora for NLP of Crisis-related Messages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05894/) (2016)
- [HumAID: Human-Annotated Disaster Incidents Data from Twitter with Deep Learning Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03090/) (2021)
- [PromptNER: Prompting For Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15444/) (2023)
- [Calibration, Entropy Rates, and Memory in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05664/) (2019)
- [Geo-knowledge-guided GPT models improve the extraction of location descriptions from disaster-related social media messages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09340/) (2023)
- [CrisisBERT: a Robust Transformer for Crisis Classification and Contextual Crisis Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06627/) (2020)
- [Location reference identification from tweets during emergencies: A deep learning approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08241/) (2019)
- [A Twitter Tale of Three Hurricanes: Harvey, Irma, and Maria](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05144/) (2018)
- [TBCOV: Two Billion Multilingual COVID-19 Tweets with Sentiment, Entity, Geo, and Gender Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03664/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Robustness of LLMs on Crisis-Related Microblogs across Events, Information Types, and Linguistic Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10413/) (2024)
- [Do LLMs Surpass Encoders for Biomedical NER?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00664/) (2025)
- [SAVITR: A System for Real-time Location Extraction from Microblogs during Emergencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07757/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale disasters can often result in catastrophic consequences on people and infrastructure. Situation awareness about such disaster impacts generated by authoritative data from in-situ sensors, remote sensing imagery, and/or geographic data is often limited due to atmospheric opacity, satellite revisits, and time limitations. This often results in geo-temporal information gaps. In contrast, impact-related social media posts can act as "geo-sensors" during a disaster, where people describe specific impacts and locations. However, not all locations mentioned in disaster-related social media posts relate to an impact. Only the impacted locations are critical for directing resources effectively. e.g., "The death toll from a fire which ripped through the Greek coastal town of #Mati stood at 80, with dozens of people unaccounted for as forensic experts tried to identify victims who were burned alive #Greecefires #AthensFires #Athens #Greece." contains impacted location "Mati" and non-impacted locations "Greece" and "Athens". This research uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify all locations, impacts and impacted locations mentioned in disaster-related social media posts. In the process, LLMs are fine-tuned to identify only impacts and impacted locations (as distinct from other, non-impacted locations), including locations mentioned in informal expressions, abbreviations, and short forms. Our fine-tuned model demonstrates efficacy, achieving an F1-score of 0.69 for impact and 0.74 for impacted location extraction, substantially outperforming the pre-trained baseline. These robust results confirm the potential of fine-tuned language models to offer a scalable solution for timely decision-making in resource allocation, situational awareness, and post-disaster recovery planning for responders.