CASE 2021 Task 2: Socio-political Fine-grained Event Classification using Fine-tuned RoBERTa Document Embeddings

Abstract

We present our submission to Task 2 of the Socio-political and Crisis Events Detection Shared Task at the CASE @ ACL-IJCNLP 2021 workshop. The task at hand aims at the fine-grained classification of socio-political events. Our best model was a fine-tuned RoBERTa transformer model using document embeddings. The corpus consisted of a balanced selection of sub-events extracted from the ACLED event dataset. We achieved a macro F-score of 0.923 and a micro F-score of 0.932 during our preliminary experiments on a held-out test set. The same model also performed best on the shared task test data (weighted F-score = 0.83). To analyze the results we calculated the topic compactness of the commonly misclassified events and conducted an error analysis.