Early-estimation-of-protest-time-spans-Using-NLP-Topic-Modeling

Protests and agitations have long used as means for showing dissident towards social, political and economic issues in civil societies. In recent years we have witnessed a large number of protests across various geographies. Not to be left behind by similar trends in the rest of the world, South Africa, in recent years have witnessed a large number of protests. This paper uses the English text description of the protests to predict their time spans/durations. The descriptions consist of multiple causes of the protests, courses of actions etc. Next we used unsupervised (topic modeling) and supervised learning (decision trees) to predict the duration of protests. The results are very promising and close to 90% of accuracy in early predicting of the duration of protests.