Learning to Extract International Relations from Political Context

Abstract

We describe a new probabilistic model for extracting events between major political actors from news corpora. Our unsupervised model brings together familiar components in natural language processing (like parsers and topic models) with contextual political information— temporal and dyad dependence—to infer latent event classes. We quantitatively evaluate the model’s performance on political science benchmarks: recovering expert-assigned event class valences, and detecting real-world conflict. We also conduct a small case study based on our model’s inferences. A supplementary appendix, and replication software/data are available online, at: http://brenocon.com/irevents