A Multi-instance Learning Approach to Civil Unrest Event Detection on Twitter

Alexandra DeLucia, Mark Dredze, Anna L. Buczak


Abstract
Social media has become an established platform for people to organize and take offline actions, often in the form of civil unrest. Understanding these events can help support pro-democratic movements. The primary method to detect these events on Twitter relies on aggregating many tweets, but this includes many that are not relevant to the task. We propose a multi-instance learning (MIL) approach, which jointly identifies relevant tweets and detects civil unrest events. We demonstrate that MIL improves civil unrest detection over methods based on simple aggregation. Our best model achieves a 0.73 F1 on the Global Civil Unrest on Twitter (G-CUT) dataset.
Anthology ID:
2023.case-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text
Month:
sEPTEMBER
Year:
2023
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Ali Hürriyetoğlu, Hristo Tanev, Vanni Zavarella, Reyyan Yeniterzi, Erdem Yörük, Milena Slavcheva
Venues:
CASE | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
18–33
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.case-1.3
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexandra DeLucia, Mark Dredze, and Anna L. Buczak. 2023. A Multi-instance Learning Approach to Civil Unrest Event Detection on Twitter. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text, pages 18–33, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
A Multi-instance Learning Approach to Civil Unrest Event Detection on Twitter (DeLucia et al., CASE-WS 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.case-1.3.pdf