SeqIA: A Python framework for extracting drought impacts from news archives

Abstract

Drought is a hazard that causes great economic, ecological, and human loss. With an ever-growing risk of climate change, their frequency and magnitude are expected to increase. While there are many indices and metrics available for the analysis of droughts, assessing their impacts represents one of the best ways to understand their magnitude and extent. However, there are no systematic records outlining these impacts.

To help in their ongoing creation, we present a software framework that leverages raw newspaper articles, identifies any drought-related ones, and automatically classifies them according to a set of socioeconomic impacts. The information is provided to the user in a structured format, including geographical coordinates and their date of reporting. Our approach employs state-of-the-art Transformer-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, which achieve great accuracy. We currently support newspaper articles in the Spanish language within Spain, but our framework can be expanded to other countries and languages.