Monitoring the Syrian War with Natural Language Processing

Summary

The civil war in Syria may no longer be in the public eye, but The Carter Center has been monitoring it since 2013. The Carter Center collects reports of incidents in the war, conducts detailed analyses, and reports these to organizations like the United Nations, the European Union, and interested non‐governmental organizations. Wars cause destruction at large scales, causing devastating loss of life and leaving behind the detritus of socioeconomic catastrophes. Since 2014, Armed Conflict Location and Event Data has been collecting data on several conflicts around the world, and, since 2018, it has been The Carter Center's main source of data about the Syrian civil war. This chapter describes how to use a large language model to help process the data to rapidly create contextually rich and interpretable content. Transformer‐based models have emerged as powerful semantic tools, allowing scientists to extract nuanced insights from vast and intricate textual datasets.