Mining News Articles Dealing with Food Security

Abstract

Food security is a major concern in West Africa, particularly in Burkina Faso, which has been the epicenter of a humanitarian crisis since the beginning of this century. Early warning systems for food insecurity and famines rely mainly on numerical data for their analyses, whereas textual data, which are more complex to process, are rarely used. To this end, we propose an original and dedicated pipeline that combines different textual analysis approaches (e.g., word embedding, sentiment analysis, and discrimination calculation) to obtain an explanatory model evaluated on real-world and large-scale data. The results of our analyses have proven how our approach provides significant results that offer distinct and complementary qualitative information on the food security theme and its spatial and temporal characteristics.