This article represents the contents of an invited talk at the 1st edition of “The International Symposium of Disaster & Emergency – Information & Intervention: Information Management and Response in Disaster and Emergencies” (SODEII 2022). The article presents the applications of Linguistics and Psycholinguistics to the fields of Crisis Management and Crisis Computing. The applications of Linguistics and Psycholinguistics are discussed because they are the scientific areas, which focus on the way in which humans communicate and understand each other. In this way, the methods from these two areas are used to contribute to two important aspects of Crisis Management – specifically Information Management and Communication Strategies. They do this not in terms of the selection or the contents of the information to be delivered to the public, but rather regarding how to best transmit the desired message and meaning. The paper illustrates their application to the fields of Crisis Management and Crisis Computing, by providing a summary of three completed research projects, which use a mixture of methods from all these fields. All three projects consist of highly interdisciplinary scientific research, practically applied to reality. Two of the three projects concern evaluating and improving the comprehensibility (understandability) of texts, delivered by official authorities to the general public in crisis or disaster situations. The third research project presents a different application – a linguistic resource, aiming to assist with the recognition and extraction of relevant disaster social media messages for Crisis Management and Crisis Computing purposes, which is achieved by applying linguistic and Natural Language Processing methods.

First International Symposium of Disaster & Emergency – Information & Intervention: Information Management and Response in Disaster and Emergencies, Atatürk University, Turkey