Automating Violence Detection and Categorization from Ancient Texts

Alhassan Abdelhalim, Michaela Regneri


Abstract
Violence descriptions in literature offer valuable insights for a wide range of research in the humanities. For historians, depictions of violence are of special interest for analyzing the societal dynamics surrounding large wars and individual conflicts of influential people. Harvesting data for violence research manually is laborious and time-consuming. This study is the first one to evaluate the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in identifying violence in ancient texts and categorizing it across multiple dimensions. Our experiments identify LLMs as a valuable tool to scale up the accurate analysis of historical texts and show the effect of fine-tuning and data augmentation, yielding an F1-score of up to 0.93 for violence detection and 0.86 for fine-grained violence categorization.
Anthology ID:
2025.latechclfl-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the 9th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2025)
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Anna Kazantseva, Stan Szpakowicz, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Yuri Bizzoni, Janis Pagel
Venues:
LaTeCHCLfL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
64–78
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.latechclfl-1.7/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Alhassan Abdelhalim and Michaela Regneri. 2025. Automating Violence Detection and Categorization from Ancient Texts. In Proceedings of the 9th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2025), pages 64–78, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automating Violence Detection and Categorization from Ancient Texts (Abdelhalim & Regneri, LaTeCHCLfL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.latechclfl-1.7.pdf