CEHA: A Dataset of Conflict Events in the Horn of Africa

Rui Bai, Di Lu, Shihao Ran, Elizabeth M. Olson, Hemank Lamba, Aoife Cahill, Joel Tetreault, Alejandro Jaimes


Abstract
Natural Language Processing (NLP) of news articles can play an important role in understanding the dynamics and causes of violent conflict. Despite the availability of datasets categorizing various conflict events, the existing labels often do not cover all of the fine-grained violent conflict event types relevant to areas like the Horn of Africa. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark dataset Conflict Events in the Horn of Africa region (CEHA) and propose a new task for identifying violent conflict events using online resources with this dataset. The dataset consists of 500 English event descriptions regarding conflict events in the Horn of Africa region with fine-grained event-type definitions that emphasize the cause of the conflict. This dataset categorizes the key types of conflict risk according to specific areas required by stakeholders in the Humanitarian-Peace-Development Nexus. Additionally, we conduct extensive experiments on two tasks supported by this dataset: Event-relevance Classification and Event-type Classification. Our baseline models demonstrate the challenging nature of these tasks and the usefulness of our dataset for model evaluations in low-resource settings.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.99
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1475–1495
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.99/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rui Bai, Di Lu, Shihao Ran, Elizabeth M. Olson, Hemank Lamba, Aoife Cahill, Joel Tetreault, and Alejandro Jaimes. 2025. CEHA: A Dataset of Conflict Events in the Horn of Africa. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1475–1495, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CEHA: A Dataset of Conflict Events in the Horn of Africa (Bai et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.99.pdf