March 6, 2025
12:15 PM – 1:15 PM
Speaker:
Stephen Davis, Department of History, University of Kentucky
Where:
327 McVey Hall
(Zoom link: https://uky.zoom.us/j/82467171189)
Title:
The Application of Machine Learning to Human Rights Data: Two Use Cases from the Bitter Aloe Project
Abstract:
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) documented gross human rights violations during apartheid through individual testimonies and incident descriptions. While this approach provided an unprecedented view of political violence, limited planning for future accessibility has constrained researchers to keyword searches and detailed reading of individual transcripts. Bitter Aloe seeks to improve access to the TRC archive by applying two natural language processing techniques: named entity recognition and document embedding. This talk will explore the methodologies used in Bitter Aloe and demonstrate their potential as a broader application of machine learning to human rights research.