Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text ( CASE 2022): Workshop and Shared Task Report (2022)

Abstract: We provide a summary of the fifth edition of the CASE workshop that is held in the scope of EMNLP 2022. The workshop consists of regular papers, two keynotes, working papers of shared task participants, and task overview papers. This workshop has been bringing together all aspects of event information collection across technical and social science fields. In addition to the progress in depth, the submission and acceptance of multimodal approaches show the widening of this interdisciplinary research topic.

## introduction the workshop on challenges and applications of automated extraction of socio-political events from text (case) has become a significant venue where all technical and social science aspects of event information collection can be discussed in its fifth edition. 1 the 2022 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (emnlp 2022) hosts the edition this year between december 7 and 11 in abu dhabi . 2 socio-political event extraction (spe) has long been a challenge for the natural language processing (nlp) community as it requires sophisticated methods in defining event ontologies, creating language resources, and developing algorithmic approaches @xcite @xcite . social and political scientists have been working to create socio-political event (spe) databases such as acled, embers, gdelt, icews, mmad, phoenix, poldem, speed, terrier, and ucdp following similar steps for decades. these projects and the new ones increasingly rely on machine learning (ml), deep learning (dl), and nlp methods to deal better 1 https://emw.ku.edu.tr/case-2022/ , accessed on november 14, 2022. with the vast amount and variety of data in this domain @xcite . automation offers scholars not only the opportunity to improve existing practices but also to vastly expand the scope of data that can be collected and studied, thus potentially opening up new research frontiers within the field of spes, such as political violence and social movements. but automated approaches suffer from major issues like bias, generalizability, class imbalance, training data limitations, and ethical issues that have the potential to affect the results of automated text processing systems and their use drastically @xcite @xcite . moreover, the results of the automated systems for spe information collection have neither been comparable to each other nor been of sufficient quality @xcite . setting a clear path toward addressing these challenges is our main focus. we are confident that the program we put together for this year's event after rigorous and thorough reviews, would bring us closer to that goal and beyond. we provide a summary of the accepted papers in the following section, which is section 2. next, the shared tasks that are organized in the scope of this workshop are described in section 3. the keynote abstracts and invited talks are provided in sections 4 and 5. finally, section 6 conclude this report with a brief summary and future outlook. ## accepted papers this year, out of 12 submissions 8 were accepted by the program committee. a quick summary of these papers are provided below. ## shared tasks three tasks were organized in the scope of case 2022. each one of these tasks shed light on a different aspect of event information collection. these are zero-shot and detailed multilingual event information, evaluation of state-of-the-art systems in replicating manually curated event datasets, and event causality detection. ## invited talks papers that are accepted to be published in the findings of emnlp 2022 and related to our workshop theme were invited to be presented during our workshop. the authors of the following papers were invited for presenting their papers: • faghihi et al. (2022) presents crisisltl-sum, the largest dataset of local crisis event timelines about wildfires, local fires, traffic, and storms available to date. crisisltlsum was built using a semi-automated cluster-thenrefine approach to collect data from the public twitter stream. ## conclusion the case workshop series has been contributing to both technical advancement in terms of shared task organization and being a venue for scholars working at the intersection of social sciences and event extraction. this role become more significant as these series are known to a wider community. following steps of this series should serve the community by preserving its inderdisciplinary setting, welcoming new methodologies, and promoting responsible development and utilization of the results of this scholarship.