CFP: Workshop and Shared-task on Challenges and Opportunities in Automated Coding of COntentious Political Events (Cope 2019) @Euro CSS 2019

[Alaeddin Selçuk Gürel]

Apologies for cross-posting

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Call for Papers: Workshop on Challenges and Opportunities in Automated
Coding of COntentious Political Events (Cope 2019) @Euro CSS 2019
<http://symposium.computationalsocialscience.eu/2019/>
September 2, 2019 at Zürich, Switzerland

URL:
https://emw.ku.edu.tr/?event=challenges-and-opportunities-in-automated-coding-of-contentious-political-events&event_date=2019-09-02
Data Challenge: https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/22842
Easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cope2019
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Collecting protest and conflict event information from news sources enables
historical and comparative studies of social movements in social and
political sciences. As the collection of event data covers more countries,
longer time periods, and more details and granularity, which are more
abound in local sources in comparison to international resources, their
utility in social science applications multiplies. Given the excessive time
and human effort costs that manual data collection would incur, there is an
increasing tendency to rely on machine learning and natural language
processing (NLP) methods to develop automated classification and extraction
tools that would possibly deal better with the enormous amount and variety
of data to be collected.

As an interdisciplinary team of researchers (composed of computer
scientists, computational linguists and social scientists) of the Emerging
Welfare Project (https://emw.ku.edu.tr), we have been working on automated
protest information collection for over two years. While building our
protest information collection models and designing our methodology, we
have encountered many of the well-known challenges of automated event
extraction, ranging from the problem of source selection to the concerns
about completeness and validity of the data to the issues of
generalizability (Wang et.al. 2016). This workshop will address these
issues and potential methods to tackle them with new methodologies and task
designs.

The need for collecting protest or conflict data has been satisfied by
manual, semi-automatic and automatic approaches. However, the results that
have been yielded by these approaches to date are either not at a
sufficient quality or they require tremendous effort to replicate on new
data. Recent reviews point at major causes for concern in existing protest
databases such as insufficient validity and reliability, inconsistencies
within and between corpora, and lack of generalizability in terms of
methodologies and results. On the one hand, manual or semi-automatic
methods require high quality human effort while,  on the other hand, text
classification and information extraction systems tend not to perform
similarly well on corpora from a setting that is different from the one
used for training. Aforementioned shortcomings stem mainly from the lack of
regard given to the variable nature of contentious politics, which takes
slightly different forms in different countries and time periods in line
with spatial and temporal variation of sociopolitical phenomena. Those who
attempt to tackle this problem usually resort to not fully automated
methods, such as using key term-based filtering of sources that attempt to
make variability more manageable but sacrifice recall performance,
resulting in missing undetermined amount of information from the outset.
Also, training models based on a single case or filtered data would yield
static tools that are less capable of performing with comparable recall and
precision when applied to contexts different from those that are trained
on. This is also a significant factor in the validity, reliability and
consistency problems facing existing protest databases.

This workshop will work to develop solutions for these methodological
issues in a collective manner.  In general, there is lack of scientific
collaboration among academic groups working on event-coding programs (Wang
et al 2016 and Lorenzini et al 2016) and the most important objective of
this workshop is to fill this gap and connect the researchers. We hope to
contribute in the formation of a possible collaborative environment for
automated event coding, which has increasingly become target of ever
growing scientific interest, budget and efforts. We also aim at editing a
special issue out of the workshop to be published in a top computational
linguistics or political science journal.
CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite empirical, theoretical or methodological contributions as
extended abstracts (500 words and at most 1 page) in the following topics
of interests :

   -

   Automated protest event coding projects’ assessment analyses
   -

   Completeness and validity of the protest event databases
   -

   Source selection problem
   -

   Report selection problem
   -

   Inconsistent corpora over time
   -

   Information Extraction for collecting protest event information
   -

   Training Data collection/annotation processes for machine learning
   -

   Limits of data preparation, tool development, and automation
   -

   Copyright of data used


DATA CHALLENGE

The workshop will have a session for discussing results of CLEF 2019 Lab
ProtestNews (https://emw.ku.edu.tr/clef-protestnews-2019/) (Hürriyetoğlu et
al., 2019) and a new edition of this lab. We will accept abstracts that are
about submissions to the new version of the lab to be presented in this
session. The subscription and submission to the new version of the
challenge will be managed on
https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/22842.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Please submit one page that contain at most 500 words and at most 1 page in
PDF format.

The submission system can be accessed on
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cope2019.

For any other question, feel free to contact us at emw at ku.edu.tr Please
check the workshop page
<https://emw.ku.edu.tr/?event=challenges-and-opportunities-in-automated-coding-of-contentious-political-events>
for any update.
IMPORTANT DATES

Data challenge submission deadline: June 21, 2019

Abstract submission deadline: June 28, 2019

Notification of acceptance: July 12, 2019

Workshop date: September 2, 2019

Registration deadline: August 10, 2019
ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE:

Erdem Yörük (Sociology, Koç University and University of Oxford)

Ali Hürriyetoğlu (Computational Linguistics, Koç University)

Çağrı Yoltar (Anthropology, Koç University)

Fırat Durusan (Political Science, Ankara University and Koç University)

Osman Mutlu (Computer Science, Koç University)

Arda Akdemir (Computer Science, Koç University)

Aline Villavicencio (Computer Science, University of Essex)
REFERENCES

Hürriyetoğlu, A., Yörük, E., Yüret, D., Yoltar, Ç., Gürel, B., Duruşan, F.,
& Mutlu, O. (2019, April). A Task Set Proposal for Automatic Protest
Information Collection Across Multiple Countries. In European Conference on
Information Retrieval (pp. 316-323). Springer, Cham. URL:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-15719-7_42

Lorenzini, J., Makarov, P., Kriesi, H., & Wueest, B. (2016). Towards a
Dataset of Automatically Coded Protest Events from English-language
Newswire Documents. In Paper presented at the Amsterdam Text Analysis
Conference. URL: http://bruno-wueest.ch/assets/files/Lorenzini_etal_2016.pdf

Wang, W., Kennedy, R., Lazer, D., & Ramakrishnan, N. (2016). Growing
pains for global monitoring of societal events. Science, 353(6307),
1502-1503. URL: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6307/1502
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