Digging into Human Rights Violations: Anaphora Resolution and Emergent Witnesses

FAIN: HJ-50110

Georgia State University (Atlanta, GA 30303-3011)
Benjamin Joshua Miller (Project Director: July 2011 to present)
Lu Xiao (Co Project Director: July 2011 to present)

Participating institutions:
Georgia State University (Atlanta, GA) - Applicant/Recipient
University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario) - Participating Institution

This project is part of Round Two of the international Digging into Data Program and was fully funded by the following funding partners: NSF [US] (US 175,000); SSHRC [Canada] (CAN 60,700). Digging into Human Rights Violations will develop an automated reader for large text archives of human rights abuses that will reconstruct stories from fragments scattered across a collection, and an interface for navigating those stories.

Unidentified victims, perpetrators, and details of human rights violations are camouflaged by the scale of archival records of witness reports; keyword based search is insufficient to extract them. Digging into Human Rights Violations will develop an automated reader for large text archives of human rights abuses that will reconstruct stories from fragments scattered across a collection, and an interface for navigating those stories. By improving on anaphora resolution techniques in Natural Language Processing for the connection of pronouns to specific nouns, this system will help researchers and courts reveal witnesses and patterns contained in their own collections. This project will read reports of historic disappearances and systemic violence in Guatemala, of abuse against women and children in Burma, and of violent incidents and rights violations in Chechnya, and provide new methods and free tools for human rights advocates.