Text Quality Analysis of Emergency Response Plans

Emergency response plans are regarded as effective guidance for natural disasters and these plans describe emergency response processes in natural language. More specifically, they are textual process descriptions and describe not only how all departments perform their own response tasks, but also how different departments interact with each other. Analyzing text quality of emergency response plans as a typical evaluation approach is an important concern in emergency responses. Because of the flexibility of natural language, emergency response plans normally contain unwanted ambiguities, and it is difficult to check consistency and completeness. Automatic text quality analysis of emergency response plans written in Chinese from the perspective of process descriptions is proposed in this paper. Firstly, three types of response tasks including message sending tasks, message receiving tasks and regular tasks are extracted through Bi-LSTM-CRF networks (a Conditional Random Fields network is combined with a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory network). Then, a series of text quality analysis rules associated with extracted response tasks are created. These rules focus on the progressive relationship of four levels of emergency responses, completeness of response tasks, ambiguity and redundancy of emergency response plans. Finally, real-world data is collected to validate the proposed approach, which consists of four types of emergency response plans of natural disasters including district, municipal, provincial and national emergency response plans. It is demonstrated that the proposed approach can be used to facilitate revisions and improvements of emergency response plans.