Discovery, analysis, and characteristics of event impacts

Assessing and monitoring events and their impacts continues to present multiple challenges. From financial markets to disaster management to epidemiology, the importance of understanding the impacts that events create cannot be understated. This work describes an approach that incorporates information from multiple sources and then analyzes the overall information flow to identify temporal patterns related to event impacts of interest. This approach is then applied to the analysis of news reports from multiple news sources pertaining to several different natural disasters. Results show that the approach provides insight into the impacts created by these natural disasters as well as indications to the severity of these impacts. In addition, results show that specific types of disaster consistently produce similar impacts when each time they occur.