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

TL;DR

This paper reports on a workshop focused on advancing automated extraction of socio-political events from news texts using modern NLP techniques, with multiple tasks and contributions from numerous research teams.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive overview of recent challenges, datasets, and shared tasks in extracting socio-political events, emphasizing multilingual and fine-grained classification methods.

Findings

Successful application of Deep Learning, Word Embeddings, and Transformers in event detection.

Participation of around 40 teams with 15 contributing to key tasks.

Advances in multilingual and zero-shot event classification techniques.

Abstract

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.