Detecting the Magnitude of Events from News Articles

Forced migration is increasingly becoming a global issue of concern. In this paper, we present an effective model of targeted event detection, as an essential step towards the forced migration detection problem. To date, most of the the approaches deal with the event detection in a general setting with the main objective of detecting the presence or onset of an event. However, we focus on analyzing the magnitude of a given event from a collection of text documents such as news articles from multiple sources. We use violence as an illustration as it is one of the most critical factors of forced migration. The recent advancements in semantic similarity measures are adopted to obtain relevant violence scores for each word in the vocabulary of news articles in an unsupervised manner. The resulting scores are then used to compute the average daily violence scores over a period of three months. Evaluation of the proposed model against a manually annotated data set yields a Pearson's correlation of 0.8. We also include a case study exploring the relationship between violence and key events.