Paper ID: 2202.07081

Introducing the ICBe Dataset: Very High Recall and Precision Event Extraction from Narratives about International Crises

Rex W. Douglass, Thomas Leo Scherer, J. Andrés Gannon, Erik Gartzke, Jon Lindsay, Shannon Carcelli, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, David M. Quinn, Catherine Aiken, Jose Miguel Cabezas Navarro, Neil Lund, Egle Murauskaite, Diana Partridge

How do international crises unfold? We conceptualize of international relations as a strategic chess game between adversaries and develop a systematic way to measure pieces, moves, and gambits accurately and consistently over a hundred years of history. We introduce a new ontology and dataset of international events called ICBe based on a very high-quality corpus of narratives from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project. We demonstrate that ICBe has higher coverage, recall, and precision than existing state of the art datasets and conduct two detailed case studies of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and Crimea-Donbas Crisis (2014). We further introduce two new event visualizations (event icongraphy and crisis maps), an automated benchmark for measuring event recall using natural language processing (sythnetic narratives), and an ontology reconstruction task for objectively measuring event precision. We make the data, online appendix, replication material, and visualizations of every historical episode available at a companion website www.crisisevents.org and the github repository.

Submitted: Feb 14, 2022