Introducing a Global Dataset on Conflict Forecasts and News Topics

This article provides a structured description of openly available news topics and forecasts for armed conflict at the national and grid cell level starting January 2010. The news topics as well as the forecasts are updated monthly at conflictforecast.org and provide coverage for more than 170 countries and about 65,000 grid cells of size 55x55km worldwide.

How to measure parenting styles?

In this paper, we measure parenting styles through unsupervised machine learning in a panel following children from age 5 to 29 months. The topic model, which is a statistical model originally developed to discover the latent semantic structures in text, classifies parents into two parenting styles: “warm” and “cold”. Parents of the warm type tend to respond to children’s expressions in a supportive manner, while parents of the cold type are less likely to engage with their children in an encouraging manner. Warm parenting is more likely amongst educated and older mothers.

Using Past Violence and Current News to Predict Changes in Violence

This article proposes a new method for predicting escalations and de-escalations of violence using a model which relies on conflict history and text features. The text features are generated from over 3.5 million newspaper articles using a so-called topic-model. We show that the combined model relies to a large extent on conflict dynamics, but that text is able to contribute meaningfully to the prediction of rare outbreaks of violence in previously peaceful countries. Given the very powerful dynamics of the conflict trap these cases are particularly important for prevention efforts

Using Past Violence and Current News to Predict Changes in Violence

This article proposes a new method for predicting escalations and de‐escalations of violence using a model which relies on conflict history and text features. The text features are generated from over 3.5 million newspaper articles using a so‐called topic‐model. We show that the combined model relies to a large extent on conflict dynamics, but that text is able to contribute meaningfully to the prediction of rare outbreaks of violence in previously peaceful countries. Given the very powerful dynamics of the conflict trap these cases are particularly important for prevention efforts.

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