Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events at the age of Large Language Models

Surendrabikram Thapa, Surabhi Adhikari, Hristo Tanev, Ali Hurriyetoglu


Abstract
Socio-political event extraction (SPE) enables automated identification of critical events such as protests, conflicts, and policy shifts from unstructured text. As a foundational tool for journalism, social science research, and crisis response, SPE plays a key role in understanding complex global dynamics. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA offers new opportunities for flexible, multilingual, and zero-shot SPE. However, applying LLMs to this domain introduces significant risks, including hallucinated outputs, lack of transparency, geopolitical bias, and potential misuse in surveillance or censorship. This position paper critically examines the promises and pitfalls of LLM-driven SPE, drawing on recent datasets and benchmarks. We argue that SPE is a high-stakes application requiring rigorous ethical scrutiny, interdisciplinary collaboration, and transparent design practices. We propose a research agenda focused on reproducibility, participatory development, and building systems that align with democratic values and the rights of affected communities.
Anthology ID:
2025.case-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Texts
Month:
September
Year:
2025
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Ali Hürriyetoğlu, Hristo Tanev, Surendrabikram Thapa
Venues:
CASE | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
6–19
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.case-1.2/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Surendrabikram Thapa, Surabhi Adhikari, Hristo Tanev, and Ali Hurriyetoglu. 2025. Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events at the age of Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Texts, pages 6–19, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events at the age of Large Language Models (Thapa et al., CASE 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.case-1.2.pdf