Crowdsourcing the Measurement of Interstate Conflict

PLoS One. 2016 Jun 16;11(6):e0156527. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0156527. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Much of the data used to measure conflict is extracted from news reports. This is typically accomplished using either expert coders to quantify the relevant information or machine coders to automatically extract data from documents. Although expert coding is costly, it produces quality data. Machine coding is fast and inexpensive, but the data are noisy. To diminish the severity of this tradeoff, we introduce a method for analyzing news documents that uses crowdsourcing, supplemented with computational approaches. The new method is tested on documents about Militarized Interstate Disputes, and its accuracy ranges between about 68 and 76 percent. This is shown to be a considerable improvement over automated coding, and to cost less and be much faster than expert coding.

MeSH terms

  • Armed Conflicts*
  • Crowdsourcing / economics
  • Crowdsourcing / statistics & numerical data*
  • Humans
  • Models, Statistical*
  • Negotiating

Grants and funding

This works has been funded by Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute (http://www.ssri.psu.edu). Award recipients are VJD, GP, and DR. This work has been funded in part by NSF Grants SBE-SES-1528624 and SBE-SES-1528409. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.