Understanding the dynamics of international politics is important yet challenging for civilians. In this work, we explore unsupervised neural models to infer relations between nations from news articles. We extend existing models by incorporating shallow linguistics information and propose a new automatic evaluation metric that aligns relationship dynamics with manually annotated key events. As understanding international relations requires carefully analyzing complex relationships, we conduct in-person human evaluations with three groups of participants. Overall, humans prefer the outputs of our model and give insightful feedback that suggests future directions for human-centered models. Furthermore, our model reveals interesting regional differences in news coverage. For instance, with respect to US-China relations, Singaporean media focus more on "strengthening" and "purchasing", while US media focus more on "criticizing" and "denouncing".
Topic modeling has been an important method to grasp important concepts from a large collection of documents in an unsupervised fashion @cite_3 @cite_11 @cite_2 @cite_0 . Similar to our work, incorporates linguistic insights with topic models to identify event classes and detect conflicts. Our work additionally models the context of relations through nouns and focuses on exploring the potential of neural models.
@cite_0 @cite_2 @cite_3 @cite_11
1995368504 2073792299 1880262756 2250753706
We present a Bayesian tensor factorization model for inferring latent group structures from dynamic pairwise interaction patterns. For decades, political scientists have collected and analyzed records of the form "country i took action a toward country j at time t" - known as dyadic events - in order to form and test theories of international relations. We represent these event data as a tensor of counts and develop Bayesian Poisson tensor factorization to infer a low-dimensional, interpretable representation of their salient patterns. We demonstrate that our model's predictive performance is better than that of standard non-negative tensor factorization methods. We also provide a comparison of our variational updates to their maximum likelihood counterparts. In doing so, we identify a better way to form point estimates of the latent factors than that typically used in Bayesian Poisson matrix factorization. Finally, we showcase our model as an exploratory analysis tool for political scientists. We show that the inferred latent factor matrices capture interpretable multilateral relations that both conform to and inform our knowledge of international a airs. Network data is ubiquitous, encoding collections of relationships between entities such as people, places, genes, or corporations. While many resources for networks of interesting entities are emerging, most of these can only annotate connections in a limited fashion. Although relationships between entities are rich, it is impractical to manually devise complete characterizations of these relationships for every pair of entities on large, real-world corpora. In this paper we present a novel probabilistic topic model to analyze text corpora and infer descriptions of its entities and of relationships between those entities. We develop variational methods for performing approximate inference on our model and demonstrate that our model can be practically deployed on large corpora such as Wikipedia. We show qualitatively and quantitatively that our model can construct and annotate graphs of relationships and make useful predictions. We describe latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), a generative probabilistic model for collections of discrete data such as text corpora. LDA is a three-level hierarchical Bayesian model, in which each item of a collection is modeled as a finite mixture over an underlying set of topics. Each topic is, in turn, modeled as an infinite mixture over an underlying set of topic probabilities. In the context of text modeling, the topic probabilities provide an explicit representation of a document. We present efficient approximate inference techniques based on variational methods and an EM algorithm for empirical Bayes parameter estimation. We report results in document modeling, text classification, and collaborative filtering, comparing to a mixture of unigrams model and the probabilistic LSI model. Continuous space word embeddings learned from large, unstructured corpora have been shown to be effective at capturing semantic regularities in language. In this paper we replace LDA’s parameterization of “topics” as categorical distributions over opaque word types with multivariate Gaussian distributions on the embedding space. This encourages the model to group words that are a priori known to be semantically related into topics. To perform inference, we introduce a fast collapsed Gibbs sampling algorithm based on Cholesky decompositions of covariance matrices of the posterior predictive distributions. We further derive a scalable algorithm that draws samples from stale posterior predictive distributions and corrects them with a Metropolis–Hastings step. Using vectors learned from a domain-general corpus (English Wikipedia), we report results on two document collections (20-newsgroups and NIPS). Qualitatively, Gaussian LDA infers different (but still very sensible) topics relative to standard LDA. Quantitatively, our technique outperforms existing models at dealing with OOV words in held-out documents.