Learning a Typhoon Bayesian Network Structure from Natural Language Reports

Given the huge toll caused by natural disasters, it is critically important to develop an effective disaster management and emergency response technique. In this article, we investigate relationships between typhoon-related variables and emergency response from natural language (NL) reports. A major challenge is to exploit typhoon state information for typhoon contingency plan generation, especially from unstructured text data based on NL input. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel framework for learning typhoon Bayesian network structures (FLTB), which can extract typhoon state information from unstructured NL, mine inter-information causal relationships and then generate Bayesian networks. We first extract information about typhoon states through NL processing (NLP) techniques, and then analyze typhoon reports by designing heuristic rules to identify causal relationships between states. We leverage these features to improve the learned structures and provide user-interaction mechanisms to finalize Bayesian networks. We evaluate the performance of our framework on real-world typhoon datasets and develop the Bayesian networks based typhoon emergency response systems.