Political and social scientists monitor, analyze and predict political unrest and violence, preventing (or mitigating) harm, and promoting the management of global conflict. They do so using event coder systems, which extract structured representations from news articles to design forecast models and event-driven continuous monitoring systems. Existing methods rely on expensive manual annotated dictionaries and do not support multilingual settings. To advance the global conflict management, we propose a novel model, Multi-CoPED (Multilingual Multi-Task Learning BERT for Coding Political Event Data), by exploiting multi-task learning and state-of-the-art language models for coding multilingual political events. This eliminates the need for expensive dictionaries by leveraging BERT models' contextual knowledge through transfer learning. The multilingual experiments demonstrate the superiority of Multi-CoPED over existing event coders, improving the absolute macro-averaged F1-scores by 23.3% and 30.7% for coding events in English and Spanish corpus, respectively. We believe that such expressive performance improvements can help to reduce harms to people at risk of violence.
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Automatic Event Coding Framework for Spanish Political News Articles
Today, Spanish speaking countries face widespread political crisis. These political conflicts are published in a large volume of Spanish news articles from Spanish agencies. Our goal is to create a fully functioning system that parses realtime Spanish texts and generates scalable event code. Rather than translating Spanish text into English text and using English event coders, we aim to create a tool that uses raw Spanish text and Spanish event coders for better flexibility, coverage, and cost.To accommodate the processing of a large number of Spanish articles, we adapt a distributed framework based on Apache Spark. We highlight how to extend the existing ontology to provide support for the automated coding process for Spanish texts. We also present experimental data to provide insight into the data collection process with filtering unrelated articles, scaling the framework, and gathering basic statistics on the dataset.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1931541
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10376287
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2020 IEEE 6th Intl Conference on Big Data Security on Cloud (BigDataSecurity), IEEE Intl Conference on High Performance and Smart Computing, (HPSC) and IEEE Intl Conference on Intelligent Data and Security (IDS)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 246 to 253
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/BigDataSecurity-HPSC-IDS49724.2020.00052
