Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE 2022): Workshop and Shared Task Report

We provide a summary of the fifth edition of the CASE workshop that is held in the scope of EMNLP 2022. The workshop consists of regular papers, two keynotes, working papers of shared task participants, and task overview papers. This workshop has been bringing together all aspects of event information collection across technical and social science fields. In addition to the progress in depth, the submission and acceptance of multimodal approaches show the widening of this interdisciplinary research topic.

Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE 2021): Workshop and Shared Task Report

This workshop is the fourth issue of a series of workshops on automatic extraction of socio-political events from news, organized by the Emerging Market Welfare Project, with the support of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission and with contributions from many other prominent scholars in this field. The purpose of this series of workshops is to foster research and development of reliable, valid, robust, and practical solutions for automatically detecting descriptions of socio-political events, such as protests, riots, wars and armed conflicts, in text streams. This year workshop contributors make use of the state-of-the-art NLP technologies, such as Deep Learning, Word Embeddings and Transformers and cover a wide range of topics from text classification to news bias detection. Around 40 teams have registered and 15 teams contributed to three tasks that are i) multilingual protest news detection, ii) fine-grained classification of socio-political events, and iii) discovering Black Lives Matter protest events. The workshop also highlights two keynote and four invited talks about various aspects of creating event data sets and multi- and cross-lingual machine learning in few- and zero-shot settings.

Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from News (AESPEN): Workshop and Shared Task Report

We describe our effort on automated extraction of socio-political events from news in the scope of a workshop and a shared task we organized at Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2020). We believe the event extraction studies in computational linguistics and social and political sciences should further support each other in order to enable large scale socio-political event information collection across sources, countries, and languages. The event consists of regular research papers and a shared task, which is about event sentence coreference identification (ESCI), tracks. All submissions were reviewed by five members of the program committee. The workshop attracted research papers related to evaluation of machine learning methodologies, language resources, material conflict forecasting, and a shared task participation report in the scope of socio-political event information collection. It has shown us the volume and variety of both the data sources and event information collection approaches related to socio-political events and the need to fill the gap between automated text processing techniques and requirements of social and political sciences.

Observing Trends in Automated Multilingual Media Analysis

Any large organisation, be it public or private, monitors the media for information to keep abreast of developments in their field of interest, and usually also to become aware of positive or negative opinions expressed towards them. At least for the written media, computer programs have become very efficient at helping the human analysts significantly in their monitoring task by gathering media reports, analysing them, detecting trends and - in some cases - even to issue early warnings or to make predictions of likely future developments. We present here trend recognition-related functionality of the Europe Media Monitor (EMM) system, which was developed by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) for public administrations in the European Union (EU) and beyond. EMM performs large-scale media analysis in up to seventy languages and recognises various types of trends, some of them combining information from news articles written in different languages and from social media posts. EMM also lets users explore the huge amount of multilingual media data through interactive maps and graphs, allowing them to examine the data from various view points and according to multiple criteria. A lot of EMM's functionality is accessibly freely over the internet or via apps for hand-held devices.

Sentiment Analysis in the News

Recent years have brought a significant growth in the volume of research in sentiment analysis, mostly on highly subjective text types (movie or product reviews). The main difference these texts have with news articles is that their target is clearly defined and unique across the text. Following different annotation efforts and the analysis of the issues encountered, we realised that news opinion mining is different from that of other text types. We identified three subtasks that need to be addressed: definition of the target; separation of the good and bad news content from the good and bad sentiment expressed on the target; and analysis of clearly marked opinion that is expressed explicitly, not needing interpretation or the use of world knowledge. Furthermore, we distinguish three different possible views on newspaper articles - author, reader and text, which have to be addressed differently at the time of analysing sentiment. Given these definitions, we present work on mining opinions about entities in English language news, in which (a) we test the relative suitability of various sentiment dictionaries and (b) we attempt to separate positive or negative opinion from good or bad news. In the experiments described here, we tested whether or not subject domain-defining vocabulary should be ignored. Results showed that this idea is more appropriate in the context of news opinion mining and that the approaches taking this into consideration produce a better performance.