HumVI: A Multilingual Dataset for Detecting Violent Incidents Impacting Humanitarian Aid

Hemank Lamba, Anton Abilov, Ke Zhang, Elizabeth M Olson, Henry Kudzanai Dambanemuya, João Cordovil Bárcia, David S. Batista, Christina Wille, Aoife Cahill, Joel R. Tetreault, Alejandro Jaimes


Abstract
Humanitarian organizations can enhance their effectiveness by analyzing data to discover trends, gather aggregated insights, manage their security risks, support decision-making, and inform advocacy and funding proposals. However, data about violent incidents with direct impact and relevance for humanitarian aid operations is not readily available. An automatic data collection and NLP-backed classification framework aligned with humanitarian perspectives can help bridge this gap. In this paper, we present HumVI – a dataset comprising news articles in three languages (English, French, Arabic) containing instances of different types of violent incidents categorized by the humanitarian sector they impact, e.g., aid security, education, food security, health, and protection. Reliable labels were obtained for the dataset by partnering with a data-backed humanitarian organization, Insecurity Insight. We provide multiple benchmarks for the dataset, employing various deep learning architectures and techniques, including data augmentation and mask loss, to address different task-related challenges, e.g., domain expansion. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/dataminr-ai/humvi-dataset.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.743
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12705–12722
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.743/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.743
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hemank Lamba, Anton Abilov, Ke Zhang, Elizabeth M Olson, Henry Kudzanai Dambanemuya, João Cordovil Bárcia, David S. Batista, Christina Wille, Aoife Cahill, Joel R. Tetreault, and Alejandro Jaimes. 2024. HumVI: A Multilingual Dataset for Detecting Violent Incidents Impacting Humanitarian Aid. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 12705–12722, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HumVI: A Multilingual Dataset for Detecting Violent Incidents Impacting Humanitarian Aid (Lamba et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.743.pdf
Data:
 2024.findings-emnlp.743.data.zip