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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. 

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.