---
license: mit
tags:
- multilabel-classification
- multilingual
- twitter
- violence-prediction
datasets:
- m2im/multilingual-twitter-collective-violence-dataset
language:
- multilingual
---

# Model Card for m2im/XLM-T_finetuned_violence_twitter

This model is a fine-tuned version of XLM-T (Twitter XLM-RoBERTa), specifically adapted to detect collective violence signals in multilingual Twitter discourse. It was developed as part of a research project focused on early-warning systems for conflict prediction.

## Model Details

### Model Description

- **Developed by:** Dr. Milton Mendieta and Dr. Timothy Warren
- **Funded by:** Coalition for Open-Source Defense Analysis (CODA) Lab, Department of Defense Analysis, Naval Postgraduate School (NPS)
- **Shared by:** Dr. Milton Mendieta and Dr. Timothy Warren
- **Model type:** Transformer-based sentence encoder fine-tuned for multilabel classification
- **Language(s):** Originally pre-trained on 31 languages commonly used on Twitter (XLM-T), then fine-tuned on 68 languages from X (formerly Twitter, 2014 onward), including the undefined `und` language category.
- **License:** MIT
- **Finetuned from model:** [cardiffnlp/twitter-xlm-roberta-base](https://huggingface.co/cardiffnlp/twitter-xlm-roberta-base)

### Model Sources

- **Repository:** [https://github.com/m2im/violence_prediction](https://github.com/m2im/violence_prediction)
- **Paper:** TBD

## Uses

### Direct Use

This model is intended to classify tweets in multiple languages into predefined categories related to proximity to collective violence events.

### Downstream Use

The model may be embedded into conflict early-warning systems, government monitoring platforms, or research pipelines analyzing social unrest.

### Out-of-Scope Use

- General-purpose sentiment analysis
- Legal, health, or financial decision-making
- Use in low-resource languages not covered by training data

## Bias, Risks, and Limitations

- **Geographic bias**: The model was primarily trained on short-duration violent events around the world, which limits its applicability to long-running conflicts (e.g., Russia-Ukraine) or high-noise environments (e.g., Washington, D.C.).
- **Temporal bias**: Performance degrades in pre-violence scenarios, especially at larger spatial scales (50 km), where signals are weaker and often masked by noise.
- **Sample size sensitivity**: The model underperforms when fewer than 5,000 observations are available per label, reducing reliability in low-data settings.
- **Spatial ambiguity**: Frequent misclassification between `pre7geo50` and `post7geo50` labels highlights the model’s challenge in distinguishing temporal contexts at broader spatial radii.
- **Language coverage limitations**: While fine-tuned on 67 languages, performance may vary for underrepresented or informal language variants.

## Recommendations

- **Use with short-term events**: For best results, apply the model to short-term events with geographically concentrated discourse, aligning with the training data distribution.
- **Avoid low-sample inference**: Do not deploy the model in scenarios where fewer than 5,000 labeled observations are available per class.
- **Limit reliance on large-radius labels**: Exercise caution when interpreting predictions at 50 km radii, which tend to capture noisy or irrelevant information.
- **Contextual validation**: Evaluate model performance on local data before broader deployment, especially in unfamiliar regions or languages.
- **Consider post-processing**: Incorporate ensemble methods or threshold adjustments to improve label differentiation in ambiguous cases.
- **Batch predictions**: Avoid use in isolated tweets; batch predictions are more reliable

## How to Get Started with the Model

```python
from transformers import pipeline
import html, re

def clean_tweet(example):
    tweet = example['text']
    tweet = tweet.replace("\n", " ")
    tweet = html.unescape(tweet)
    tweet = re.sub("@[A-Za-z0-9_:]+", "", tweet)
    tweet = re.sub(r'http\S+', '', tweet)
    tweet = re.sub('RT ', '', tweet)
    return {'text': tweet.strip()}

pipe = pipeline("text-classification", model="m2im/XLM-T_finetuned_violence_twitter", tokenizer="m2im/XLM-T_finetuned_violence_twitter", top_k=None)

example = {"text": "Protesta en Quito por medidas económicas."}
cleaned = clean_tweet(example)
print(pipe(cleaned["text"]))
```

## Training Details

### Training Data

- Dataset: [m2im/multilingual-twitter-collective-violence-dataset](https://huggingface.co/datasets/m2im/multilingual-twitter-collective-violence-dataset)
- Labels: 6 of the most informative out of 40 available:
  - `pre7geo10`, `pre7geo30`, `pre7geo50`
  - `post7geo10`, `post7geo30`, `post7geo50`

### Training Procedure

- Text preprocessing using tweet normalization (removal of mentions, URLs, etc.)
- Tokenization with XLM-T tokenizer
- Multi-label head using `BCEWithLogitsLoss`

#### Training Hyperparameters

- Model checkpoints: `cardiffnlp/twitter-xlm-roberta-base`
- Head class: `AutoModelForSequenceClassification`
- Optimizer: AdamW
- Batch size (train/validation): 1024
- Epochs: 20
- Learning rate: 5e-5
- Learning rate scheduler: Cosine
- Weight decay: 0.1
- Max sequence length: 32
- Precision: Mixed fp16
- Random seed: 42
- Saving strategy: Save the best model only when the ROC-AUC score improves on the validation set

## Evaluation

### Testing Data, Factors & Metrics

- **Dataset**: Held-out portion of the multilingual Twitter collective violence dataset, including over 275,000 tweets labeled across six spatio-temporal categories (`pre7geo10`, `pre7geo30`, `pre7geo50`, `post7geo10`, `post7geo30`, `post7geo50`).
- **Metrics**: 
  - **ROC-AUC** (Receiver Operating Characteristic - Area Under Curve): Evaluates the model’s ability to distinguish between classes across all thresholds.
  - **Macro F1**: Harmonic mean of precision and recall, averaged equally across all classes.
  - **Micro F1**: Harmonic mean of precision and recall, aggregated globally across all predictions.
  - **Precision** and **Recall**: Standard classification metrics to assess false positive and false negative trade-offs.

### Results

- Classical ML models (Random Forest, SVM, Bagging, Boosting, and Decision Trees) were trained on XLM-T-generated sentence embeddings. The best performing classical model—Random Forest—achieved a **macro F1 score of approximately 0.61**, indicating that embeddings alone provide meaningful but limited discrimination for the multilabel classification task.
- In contrast, the **fine-tuned XLM-T model**, trained end-to-end with a classification head, outperformed all baseline classical models by achieving a **ROC-AUC score of 0.7268** on the validation set.
- These results demonstrate the value of supervised fine-tuning over using frozen embeddings with classical classifiers, particularly in tasks involving subtle multilingual and spatio-temporal signal detection.

## Model Examination

- Embedding analysis was conducted using a two-stage dimensionality reduction process: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) reduced the 768-dimensional XLM-T sentence embeddings to 50 dimensions, followed by Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) to reduce to 2 dimensions for visualization.
- The resulting 2D projections revealed coherent clustering of sentence embeddings by label, particularly in post-violence scenarios and at smaller spatial scales (10 km), indicating that the model effectively captures latent structure related to spatio-temporal patterns of collective violence.
- Examination of classification performance across labels further confirmed that the model is most reliable when predicting post-violence instances near the epicenter of an event, while its ability to detect pre-violence signals—especially at broader spatial radii (50 km)—is weaker and more prone to noise.

## Environmental Impact

- **Hardware Type:** 16 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs
- **Hours used:** ~10 hours
- **Cloud Provider:** University research computing cluster
- **Compute Region:** North America
- **Carbon Emitted:** Not formally calculated

## Technical Specifications

### Model Architecture and Objective

- Transformer encoder based on XLM-RoBERTa
- Objective: Multilabel binary classification 

### Compute Infrastructure

- **Hardware:** One server with 16 × V100 GPUs and one server with 3 TB of RAM, both available at the CODA Lab.
- **Software:** PyTorch 2.0, Hugging Face Transformers 4.x, KV-Swarm (an in-memory database also hosted at the CODA Lab), Weight and Biases for experiment tracking and model management

## Citation

**BibTeX:**  

```bibtex
@misc{mendieta2025labseviolence,
  author       = {Milton Mendieta, Timothy Warren},
  title        = {Fine-Tuning Multilingual Language Models to Predict Collective Violence Using Twitter Data},
  year         = {2025},
  publisher    = {Hugging Face},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/m2im/XLM-T_finetuned_violence_twitter}},
  note         = {Research on multilingual NLP and conflict prediction}
}
```

## Citation
  
**APA:**  
Mendieta, M., & Warren, T. (2025). *Fine-tuning multilingual language models to predict collective violence using Twitter data* [Model]. Hugging Face. https://huggingface.co/m2im/XLM-T_finetuned_violence_twitter

## Model Card Authors

Dr. Milton Mendieta and Dr. Timothy Warren

## Model Card Contact

mvmendie@espol.edu.ec