CamPros at CASE 2022 Task 1: Transformer-based Multilingual Protest News Detection

Socio-political protests often lead to grave consequences when they occur. The early detection of such protests is very important for taking early precautionary measures. However, the main shortcoming of protest event detection is the scarcity of sufficient training data for specific language categories, which makes it difficult to train data-hungry deep learning models effectively. Therefore, cross-lingual and zero-shot learning models are needed to detect events in various low-resource languages. This paper proposes a multi-lingual cross-document level event detection approach using pre-trained transformer models developed for Shared Task 1 at CASE 2022. The shared task constituted four subtasks for event detection at different granularity levels, i.e., document level to token level, spread over multiple languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Urdu, and Mandarin). Our system achieves an average F1 score of 0.73 for document-level event detection tasks. Our approach secured 2nd position for the Hindi language in subtask 1 with an F1 score of 0.80. While for Spanish, we secure 4th position with an F1 score of 0.69. Our code is available at https://github.com/nehapspathak/campros/.