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The fairness-aware online learning framework has emerged as a potent tool within the context of continuous lifelong learning. In this scenario, the learner’s objective is to progressively acquire new tasks as they arrive over time, while also guaranteeing statistical parity among various protected sub-populations, such as race and gender when it comes to the newly introduced tasks. A significant limitation of current approaches lies in their heavy reliance on the i.i.d (independent and identically distributed) assumption concerning data, leading to a static regret analysis of the framework. Nevertheless, it’s crucial to note that achieving low static regret does not necessarily translate to strong performance in dynamic environments characterized by tasks sampled from diverse distributions. In this article, to tackle the fairness-aware online learning challenge in evolving settings, we introduce a unique regret measure, FairSAR, by incorporating long-term fairness constraints into a strongly adapted loss regret framework. Moreover, to determine an optimal model parameter at each time step, we introduce an innovative adaptive fairness-aware online meta-learning algorithm, referred to as FairSAOML. This algorithm possesses the ability to adjust to dynamic environments by effectively managing bias control and model accuracy. The problem is framed as a bi-level convex-concave optimization, considering both the model’s primal and dual parameters, which pertain to its accuracy and fairness attributes, respectively. Theoretical analysis yields sub-linear upper bounds for both loss regret and the cumulative violation of fairness constraints. Our experimental evaluation of various real-world datasets in dynamic environments demonstrates that our proposed FairSAOML algorithm consistently outperforms alternative approaches rooted in the most advanced prior online learning methods. 

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. 

This study investigates the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to analyze politics, conflicts and violence in the Middle East using domain-specific pre-trained language models. We introduce Arabic text and present ConfliBERT-Arabic, a pre-trained language models that can efficiently analyze political, conflict and violence-related texts. Our technique hones a pre-trained model using a corpus of Arabic texts about regional politics and conflicts. Performance of our models is compared to baseline BERT models. Our findings show that the performance of NLP models for Middle Eastern politics and conflict analysis are enhanced by the use of domain-specific pre-trained local language models. This study offers political and conflict analysts, including policymakers, scholars, and practitioners new approaches and tools for deciphering the intricate dynamics of local politics and conflicts directly in Arabic. 

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 

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. 

This paper explores three different model components to improve predictive performance over the ViEWS benchmark: a class of neural networks that account for spatial and temporal dependencies; the use of CAMEO-coded event data; and the continuous rank probability score (CRPS), which is a proper scoring metric. We forecast changes in state based violence across Africa at the grid-month level. The results show that spatio-temporal graph convolutional neural network models offer consistent improvements over the benchmark. The CAMEO-coded event data sometimes improve performance, but sometimes decrease performance. Finally, the choice of performance metric, whether it be the mean squared error or a proper metric such as the CRPS, has an impact on model selection. Each of these components–algorithms, measures, and metrics–can improve our forecasts and understanding of violence.