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Analyzing conflicts and political violence around the world is a persistent challenge in the political science and policy communities due in large part to the vast volumes of specialized text needed to monitor conflict and violence on a global scale. To help advance research in political science, we introduce ConfliBERT, a domain-specific pre-trained language model for conflict and political violence. We first gather a large domain-specific text corpus for language modeling from various sources. We then build ConfliBERT using two approaches: pre-training from scratch and continual pre-training. To evaluate ConfliBERT, we collect 12 datasets and implement 18 tasks to assess the models’ practical application in conflict research. Finally, we evaluate several versions of ConfliBERT in multiple experiments. Results consistently show that ConfliBERT outperforms BERT when analyzing political violence and conflict.
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ConfliBERT-Spanish: A Pre-trained Spanish Language Model for Political Conflict and Violence
This article introduces ConfliBERT-Spanish, a pre-trained language model specialized in political conflict and violence for text written in the Spanish language. Our methodology relies on a large corpus specialized in politics and violence to extend the capacity of pre-trained models capable of processing text in Spanish. We assess the performance of ConfliBERT-Spanish in comparison to Multilingual BERT and BETO baselines for binary classification, multi-label classification, and named entity recognition. Results show that ConfliBERT-Spanish consistently outperforms baseline models across all tasks. These results show that our domain-specific language-specific cyberinfrastructure can greatly enhance the performance of NLP models for Latin American conflict analysis. This methodological advancement opens vast opportunities to help researchers and practitioners in the security sector to effectively analyze large amounts of information with high degrees of accuracy, thus better equipping them to meet the dynamic and complex security challenges affecting the region.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2311142
- PAR ID:
- 10522656
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Vakka
- ISSN:
- 2323-1884
- ISBN:
- 978-1-6654-6133-7
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 287 to 292
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Agadir - Essaouira, Morocco
- 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/CiSt56084.2023.10409883
