An automated online crisis dispatcher
Siska Fitrianie, Léon J. M. Rothkrantz · International Journal of Emergency Management · 2008
During crisis events, human operators in a crisis centre will be overloaded with a large amount of information. The stress of dealing with crisis situations can have a significant impact on the certainty of the information. The need for a system that is able to handle information calls automatically may then become apparent. Our research is about a dialogue system that can play as a crisis hotline dispatcher. The dialogue system offers a natural user interaction through its ability to start a user-friendly dialogue taking care of the content, context and user's emotion. It retrieves information about crisis situations from users while controlling the communication flow. The system is able to recognise the emotion loading of the user's linguistic content. The recogniser uses a database that contains selected keywords on a 2D 'arousal' and 'valence' scale. Its output includes an indication of the urgency of the information regarding the crisis.