Cross-context news corpus for protest event-related knowledge base construction

Abstract

We describe a gold standard corpus of protest events that comprise various local and international English language sources from various countries. The corpus contains document-, sentence-, and token-level annotations. This corpus facilitates creating machine learning models that automatically classify news articles and extract protest event-related information, constructing knowledge bases that enable comparative social and political science studies. For each news source, the annotation starts with random samples of news articles and continues with samples drawn using active learning. Each batch of samples is annotated by two social and political scientists, adjudicated by an annotation supervisor, and improved by identifying annotation errors semi-automatically. We found that the corpus possesses the variety and quality that are necessary to develop and benchmark text classification and event extraction systems in a cross-context setting, contributing to the generalizability and robustness of automated text processing systems. This corpus and the reported results will establish a common foundation in automated protest event collection studies, which is currently lacking in the literature.