GENTRAC: A Tool for Tracing Trauma in Genocide and Mass Atrocity Court Transcripts

Miriam Schirmer, Christian Brechenmacher, Endrit Jashari, Juergen Pfeffer

Abstract
This paper introduces GENTRAC, an open-access web-based tool built to interactively detect and analyze potentially traumatic content in witness statements of genocide and mass atrocity trials. Harnessing recent developments in natural language processing (NLP) to detect trauma, GENTRAC processes and formats court transcripts for NLP analysis through a sophisticated parsing algorithm and detects the likelihood of traumatic content for each speaker segment. The tool visualizes the density of such content throughout a trial day and provides statistics on the overall amount of traumatic content and speaker distribution. Capable of processing transcripts from four prominent international criminal courts, including the International Criminal Court (ICC), GENTRAC’s reach is vast, tailored to handle millions of pages of documents from past and future trials. Detecting potentially re-traumatizing examination methods can enhance the development of trauma-informed legal procedures. GENTRAC also serves as a reliable resource for legal, human rights, and other professionals, aiding their comprehension of mass atrocities’ emotional toll on survivors.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.677
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
7666–7671
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.677
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Miriam Schirmer, Christian Brechenmacher, Endrit Jashari, and Juergen Pfeffer. 2024. GENTRAC: A Tool for Tracing Trauma in Genocide and Mass Atrocity Court Transcripts. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 7666–7671, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
GENTRAC: A Tool for Tracing Trauma in Genocide and Mass Atrocity Court Transcripts (Schirmer et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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