AUTHOR=Hossain K. S. M. Tozammel , Harutyunyan Hrayr , Ning Yue , Kennedy Brendan , Ramakrishnan Naren , Galstyan Aram 

TITLE=Identifying geopolitical event precursors using attention-based LSTMs

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence

VOLUME=Volume 5 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2022.893875

DOI=10.3389/frai.2022.893875

ISSN=2624-8212

ABSTRACT=Forecasting societal events such as civil unrests, mass protests, and violent conflicts is a challenging problem with a number of important real-world applications in planning and policy making. While traditional forecasting approaches have typically relied on historical time series for generating such forecasts,  recent research has focused on using open source surrogate data for more accurate and timely forecasts. Furthermore, leveraging such data can also help to identify precursors of those events that can be used to gain insights into the generated forecasts. The key challenge is to develop a unified framework for forecasting and precursor identification that can deal with missing historical data, is sufficiently flexible to handle different types of events, and allows for an interpretable representation of the identified precursors. Although existing methods exhibit promising performance for predictive modeling in event detection, these models do not adequately address the above challenges. Here we propose a unified framework based on an attention-based LSTM model to simultaneously forecast events with sequential text datasets as well as identify precursors at different granularities such as document and document excerpts levels. The key idea is to leverage word context in sequential, time-stamped text documents such as news articles and blogs for learning a rich set of precursors. We validate the proposed framework by conducting extensive experiments with two real-world datasets---military action and violent conflicts in the Middle East and mass protests in Latin America. Our results show that overall,
the proposed approach generates more accurate forecasts compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods, while at the same time producing a rich set of precursors for the forecasted events.