Automating CIRI Ratings of Human Rights Reports Using GATE
Department
Joshua Joiner, Masters Student School of Computing
Karthikeyan Umapathy, Associate Professor, School of Computing
Start Date
2-11-2016 10:00 AM
End Date
2-11-2016 4:00 PM
Description
This project involves parsing human rights reports produced by the United States Government and rating the human practices for various countries based on the CIRI (Cingranelli-Richards) Human Rights Data Project dataset. The United States Human Rights Reports are annual reports that cover internationally recognized human rights practices in regards to individual, civil, political, and worker rights. Students, scholars, policymakers, and analysts use the CIRI data for practical and research purposes. CIRI analyzed the annual reports from 1981 to 2011 and then stopped releasing the dataset for any further years. CIRI coders relies on a manual process of scouring the Human Rights Reports and then applying rating scores to each human rights practice for each country. The objective of this project is to automate the process of scouring the human rights country reports. To accomplish this objective, we use GATE (General Architecture for Text Engineering) text mining platform. GATE is an open source software project used to provide solutions for text processing. We use various customizable GATE plugins in conjunction with the coding schemes provided by the CIRI Project documentation to create an automated ratings process. The accuracy of this tool will be evaluated by comparing the automated ratings to the existing ratings within the CIRI dataset. The expected contribution of this project is to provide an automated way to rate country human rights practices so that the purpose of the CIRI Data Project can be continued.
Automating CIRI Ratings of Human Rights Reports Using GATE
This project involves parsing human rights reports produced by the United States Government and rating the human practices for various countries based on the CIRI (Cingranelli-Richards) Human Rights Data Project dataset. The United States Human Rights Reports are annual reports that cover internationally recognized human rights practices in regards to individual, civil, political, and worker rights. Students, scholars, policymakers, and analysts use the CIRI data for practical and research purposes. CIRI analyzed the annual reports from 1981 to 2011 and then stopped releasing the dataset for any further years. CIRI coders relies on a manual process of scouring the Human Rights Reports and then applying rating scores to each human rights practice for each country. The objective of this project is to automate the process of scouring the human rights country reports. To accomplish this objective, we use GATE (General Architecture for Text Engineering) text mining platform. GATE is an open source software project used to provide solutions for text processing. We use various customizable GATE plugins in conjunction with the coding schemes provided by the CIRI Project documentation to create an automated ratings process. The accuracy of this tool will be evaluated by comparing the automated ratings to the existing ratings within the CIRI dataset. The expected contribution of this project is to provide an automated way to rate country human rights practices so that the purpose of the CIRI Data Project can be continued.