Text as Data for Crisis-Early Warning: A Comparative Assessment of NLP Methods for Conflict Prediction

Natural language processing (NLP) tools have been applied successfully in improving predictions in a wide range of research areas. However, what works in one area may not work in conflict research. We therefore seek to offer an initial assessment of the most prominent NLP methods for conflict prediction tasks. We evaluate the performance of features extracted from a conflict dictionary, two sentiment dictionaries, a word-scaling approach, dynamic topic models, and a transformer model on a classical conflict prediction task. The results highlight the importance of considering different NLP approaches, depending on the availability of text sources and other predictor variables.