NSUT-NLP at CASE 2022 Task 1: Multilingual Protest Event Detection using Transformer-based Models

Abstract

Event detection, specifically in the sociopolitical domain, has posed a long-standing challenge to researchers in the NLP domain. Therefore, the creation of automated techniques that perform classification of the large amounts of accessible data on the Internet becomes imperative. This paper is a summary of the efforts we made in participating in Task 1 of CASE 2022. We use state-of-art multilingual BERT (mBERT) with further fine-tuning to perform document classification in English, Portuguese, Spanish, Urdu, Hindi, Turkish and Mandarin. In the document classification subtask, we were able to achieve F1 scores of 0.8062, 0.6445, 0.7302, 0.5671, 0.6555, 0.7545 and 0.6702 in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Urdu, Mandarin and Turkish respectively achieving a rank of 5 in English and 7 on the remaining language tasks.