Classifying Dyads for Militarized Conflict Analysis

Niklas Stoehr, Lucas Torroba Hennigen, Samin Ahbab, Robert West, Ryan Cotterell


Abstract
Understanding the origins of militarized conflict is a complex, yet important undertaking. Existing research seeks to build this understanding by considering bi-lateral relationships between entity pairs (dyadic causes) and multi-lateral relationships among multiple entities (systemic causes). The aim of this work is to compare these two causes in terms of how they correlate with conflict between two entities. We do this by devising a set of textual and graph-based features which represent each of the causes. The features are extracted from Wikipedia and modeled as a large graph. Nodes in this graph represent entities connected by labeled edges representing ally or enemy-relationships. This allows casting the problem as an edge classification task, which we term dyad classification. We propose and evaluate classifiers to determine if a particular pair of entities are allies or enemies. Our results suggest that our systemic features might be slightly better correlates of conflict. Further, we find that Wikipedia articles of allies are semantically more similar than enemies.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.613
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7775–7784
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.613
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.613
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Niklas Stoehr, Lucas Torroba Hennigen, Samin Ahbab, Robert West, and Ryan Cotterell. 2021. Classifying Dyads for Militarized Conflict Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7775–7784, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Classifying Dyads for Militarized Conflict Analysis (Stoehr et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.613.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.613.mp4
Code
 conflict-ai/conflictwiki