Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) and Big Data technologies have been crucial for scientists to analyze political unrest and violence, prevent harm, and promote global conflict management. Government agencies and public security organizations have invested heavily in deep learning-based applications to study global conflicts and political violence. However, such applications involving text classification, information extraction, and other NLP-related tasks require extensive human efforts in annotating/labeling texts. While limited labeled data may drastically hurt the models’ performance (over-fitting), large demands on annotation tasks may turn real-world applications impracticable. To address this problem, we propose Confli-T5, a prompt-based method that leverages the domain knowledge from existing political science ontology to generate synthetic but realistic labeled text samples in the conflict and mediation domain. Our model allows generating textual data from the ground up and employs our novel Double Random Sampling mechanism to improve the quality (coherency and consistency) of the generated samples. We conduct experiments over six standard datasets relevant to political science studies to show the superiority of Confli-T5. Our codes are publicly available
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CoMe-KE: A New Transformers Based Approach for Knowledge Extraction in Conflict and Mediation Domain
Knowledge discovery and extraction approaches attract special attention across industries and areas moving toward the 5V Era. In the political and social sciences, scholars and governments dedicate considerable resources to develop intelligent systems for monitoring, analyzing and predicting conflicts and affairs involving political entities across the globe. Such systems rely on background knowledge from external knowledge bases, that conflict experts commonly maintain manually. The high costs and extensive human efforts associated with updating and extending these repositories often compromise their correctness of. Here we introduce CoMe-KE (Conflict and Mediation Knowledge Extractor) to extend automatically knowledge bases about conflict and mediation events. We explore state-of-the-art natural language models to discover new political entities, their roles and status from news. We propose a distant supervised method and propose an innovative zero-shot approach based on a dynamic hypothesis procedure. Our methods leverage pre-trained models through transfer learning techniques to obtain excellent results with no need for a labeled data. Finally, we demonstrate the superiority of our method through a comprehensive set of experiments involving two study cases in the social sciences domain. CoMe-KE significantly outperforms the existing baseline, with (on average) double of the performance retrieving new political entities.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1931541
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10470308
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1449 to 1459
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Orlando, FL, USA
- 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/BigData52589.2021.9672080
