Frameworks: Infrastructure for Political and Social Event Data Using Machine Learning

The study of political violence is a central concern for researchers and analysts who have devoted significant resources to monitor, understand, and predict political violence at a global scale. Baded on prior NSF grants (OAC-1931541, SBE-SMA-1539302), this research develops and extends ConfliBERT, a domain-specific language model trained on an expert-curated corpus about conflict and political violence (Hu et al. 2022). ConfliBERT improves downstream tasks for conflict research while significantly alleviating human annotation efforts. We expand ConfliBERT to multilingual settings including Arabic and Spanish, update our corpora in sustainable ways, retrain ConfliBERT on a continuous basis, provide new political network data, and develop our language models for users to create customized datasets and applications.