ConfliBERT: A Pre-trained Language Model for Political Conflict and Violence

Yibo Hu, Mohammad Saleh Hosseini, Erick Skorupa Parolin, Javier Osorio, Latifur Khan, Patrick T. Brandt, Vito J. D'Orazio

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

26 Scopus citations

Abstract

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 pretraining. 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. Our code is publicly available.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationNAACL 2022 - 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationHuman Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages5469-5482
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781955917711
StatePublished - 2022
Event2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2022 - Seattle, United States
Duration: Jul 10 2022Jul 15 2022

Publication series

NameNAACL 2022 - 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

Conference2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySeattle
Period7/10/227/15/22

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Information Systems
  • Software

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