An NLP-Powered Human Rights Monitoring Platform

Effective information management has long been a problem in organisations that are not of a scale that they can afford their own department dedicated to this task. Growing information overload has made this problem even more pronounced. On the other hand we have recently witnessed the emergence of intelligent tools, packages and resources that made it possible to rapidly transfer knowledge from the academic community to industry, government and other potential beneficiaries. Here we demonstrate how adopting state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) and crowdsourcing methods has resulted in measurable benefits for a human rights organisation by transforming their information and knowledge management using a novel approach that supports human rights monitoring in conflict zones. More specifically, we report on mining and classifying Arabic Twitter in order to identify potential human rights abuse incidents in a continuous stream of social media data within a specified geographical region. Results show deep learning approaches such as LSTM allow us to push the precision close to 85% for this task with an F1-score of 75%. Apart from the scientific insights we also demonstrate the viability of the framework which has been deployed as the Ceasefire Iraq portal for more than three years which has already collected thousands of witness reports from within Iraq. This work is a case study of how progress in artificial intelligence has disrupted even the operation of relatively small-scale organisations.