DA-VINCIS: Detection of Aggressive and Violent Incidents from Social Media in Spanish

Introduction

 Violence has obvious negative effects on those who witness or experience it, including a higher incidence of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, among others. In addition, violence events have a high impact for governments, as they are in charge of guaranteeing security to their population. 

Therefore, the detection and tracking of violence related events is critical. In this context, social networks comprise a valuable information source for the detection and monitoring of violent events, as people very often post publications notifying the occurrence of violent events in real time. 

This represents an important opportunity for IT researchers that can provide solutions based on natural language processing for the timely detection of violent incidents in social networks. Solutions of this kind could be used by authorities to respond more efficiently to events happening in real time, and to develop crime prevention policies according to geographical zones and types of events. Likewise, such solutions would be very helpful to the population, as one could know what violent events are happening in which zones in real time.