An NLP Case Study on Predicting the Before and After of the Ukraine–Russia and Hamas–Israel Conflicts

Jordan Miner, John E. Ortega


Abstract
We propose a method to predict toxicity and other textual attributes through the use of natural language processing (NLP) techniques for two recent events: the Ukraine-Russia and Hamas-Israel conflicts. This article provides a basis for exploration in future conflicts with hopes to mitigate risk through the analysis of social media before and after a conflict begins. Our work compiles several datasets from Twitter and Reddit for both conflicts in a before and after separation with an aim of predicting a future state of social media for avoidance. More specifically, we show that: (1) there is a noticeable difference in social media discussion leading up to and following a conflict and (2) social media discourse on platforms like Twitter and Reddit is useful in identifying future conflicts before they arise. Our results show that through the use of advanced NLP techniques (both supervised and unsupervised) toxicity and other attributes about language before and after a conflict is predictable with a low error of nearly 1.2 percent for both conflicts.
Anthology ID:
2024.nlp4pi-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Daryna Dementieva, Oana Ignat, Zhijing Jin, Rada Mihalcea, Giorgio Piatti, Joel Tetreault, Steven Wilson, Jieyu Zhao
Venue:
NLP4PI
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
140–151
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4pi-1.14
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jordan Miner and John E. Ortega. 2024. An NLP Case Study on Predicting the Before and After of the Ukraine–Russia and Hamas–Israel Conflicts. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact, pages 140–151, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An NLP Case Study on Predicting the Before and After of the Ukraine–Russia and Hamas–Israel Conflicts (Miner & Ortega, NLP4PI 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4pi-1.14.pdf