CASE 2021 : Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE) @ACL2021

Today, the unprecedented quantity of easily accessible data on social, political, and economic processes offers ground-breaking potential in guiding data-driven analysis in social and human sciences and in driving informed policy-making processes. The need for precise and high-quality information about a wide variety of events ranging from political violence, environmental catastrophes, and conflict, to international economic and health crises has rapidly escalated (Porta and Diani, 2015; Coleman et al. 2014). Governments, multilateral organizations, local and global NGOs, and social movements present an increasing demand for this data to prevent or resolve conflicts, provide relief for those that are afflicted, or improve the lives of and protect citizens in a variety of ways. For instance, Black Lives Matter protests[1] and conflict in Syria[2] events are only two examples where we must understand, analyze, and improve the real-life situations using such data.

Event extraction has long been a challenge for the natural language processing (NLP) community as it requires sophisticated methods in defining event ontologies, creating language resources, and developing algorithmic approaches (Pustojevsky et al. 2003; Boroş, 2018; Chen et al. 2021). Social and political scientists have been working to create socio-political event databases such as ACLED, EMBERS, GDELT, ICEWS, MMAD, PHOENIX, POLDEM, SPEED, TERRIER, and UCDP following similar steps for decades. These projects and the new ones increasingly rely on machine learning (ML) and NLP methods to deal better with the vast amount and variety of data in this domain (Hürriyetoğlu et al. 2020). Automation offers scholars not only the opportunity to improve existing practices, but also to vastly expand the scope of data that can be collected and studied, thus potentially opening up new research frontiers within the field of socio-political events, such as political violence & social movements. But automated approaches as well suffer from major issues like bias, generalizability, class imbalance, training data limitations, and ethical issues that have the potential to affect the results and their use drastically (Lau and Baldwin 2020; Bhatia et al. 2020; Chang et al. 2019). Moreover, the results of the automated systems for socio-political event information collection may not be comparable to each other or not of sufficient quality (Wang et al. 2016; Schrodt 2020).