Dzsihád és nlp

Tegnap futottam bele a Mancs honlapján egy interjúba Miklósi Lászlóval a Történelemtanárok Egyletének elnökével. Engem is meglep, hogy pont a fiatal bölcsészek tolódnak egyre inkább jobbra, de rögtön beugrott két tanulmány. Jeskó József, Bakó Judit és Tóth Zoltán A radikális jobboldal webes hálózatai című írása nagyon szépen összefoglalja, miképp formálódott a radikális jobb webes jelenléte, ami kulcsfontosságú a fiatalok elérésében (érdemes elolvasni, már csak azért is, mert eddig ez az egyetlen általam is ismert hazai adatvezérelt társadalomtudományi cikk). Ugyanakkor hiányzik még annak megértése, miképp válnak radikálissá pont humán beállítottságú emberek. Itt kerül képbe a dzsihád.  Rich Nielsen a Harvard Department of Goverment PhD hallgatója azt vizsgálja miért válnak radikálissá egyes muszlim vallás- és jogtudósok (ulema). Még nem publikált, de már elérhető tanulmánya a Jihadi Radicalization of Muslim Clerics remek példa arra, hogyan alkalmazható a számítógépes nyelvészet a társadalomtudományi tartalomelemzésben. Az absztrakt remekül összefoglalja a tanulmányt (elvégre ez a dolga):

This paper explains why some Muslim clerics adopt the ideology of militant Jihad while others do not. I argue that clerics strategically adopt or reject Jihadi ideology because of career incentives generated by the structure of cleric educational networks. Well-connected clerics enjoy substantial success at pursuing comfortable careers within state-run religious institutions and they reject Jihadi ideology in exchange for continued material support from the state. Clerics with poor educational networks cannot rely on connections to advance through the state-run institutions, so many pursue careers outside of the system by appealing directly to lay audiences for support. These clerics are more likely to adopt Jihadi ideology because it helps them demonstrate to potential supporters that they have not been theologically coopted by political elites. I provide evidence of these dynamics by collecting and analyzing 29,430 fatwas, articles, and books written by 91 contemporary clerics. Using statistical natural language processing, I measure the extent to which each cleric adopts Jihadi ideology in their writing. I combine this with biographical and network information about each cleric to trace the process by which poorly-connected clerics become more likely to adopt Jihadi ideology.

A The Economist cikke röviden és érthetően összegzi Nielsen eredményeit.  A mi szempontunkból legalább annyira érdekes a kutatás módszertana.

There is no way to determine the population of Muslim clerics, so randomly sampling clerics for analysis is not a possibility. Instead, I focus the analysis on contemporary Sunni clerics writing in Arabic. In order to compare Jihadi clerics to the those that were most likely to become Jihadi but ultimately did not, I intentionally over-sample two key groups of clerics: (1) Jihad clerics and (2) conservative Salafi clerics who share similar beliefs to Jihadis but reject the ideology of militant Jihad. Practically, this means the analysis is focused on conservative clerics primarily from Saudi Arabia (58 percent) and Egypt (22 percent) who are currently living or lived in the last century. [...] To measure the ideology of these clerics, I collect their books, articles, and fatwas with special emphasis on the latter.

Nielsen célja az volt, hogy beazonosítsa a radikális és nem-radikális ulemákat elérhető szövegeik alapján. Ehhez a gépi tanulást hívta segítségül:

In principle, identifying Jihadi ideology is often as simple as distinguishing between these two texts. However, with 29,430 texts from 91 clerics, close reading of each is infeasible. Instead, I measure cleric ideology by applying supervised learning methods from the statistical machine learning literature (Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman, 2009) to the documents. Most of the previous work on measuring the ideology of political actors has used roll-call votes to estimate actor ideal points (Poole and Rosenthal, 1985; Martin and Quinn, 2002). This is not possible for Muslim clerics (because they do not vote on a common set of proposals), so instead, I directly scale the texts to estimate cleric support for militant Jihadi ideology. My method uses two sets of training documents, one of which is assumed to be Jihadi and the other of which is assumed to be non-Jihadi. The Jihadi corpus consists of 765 texts of various genres that are available on Jihadi web forums as the “Mujahid’s bookbag” (ﺎﻫﺪĐا ﺣﻘﻴﺒﺔ).13 These documents are specifically selected by Jihadis themselves as sources of spiritual instruction and advice, as well as mixed political and religious commentary.14 By using a set of known Jihadi documents as my training data, I avoid the difficult task of deciding which texts are most authentically “Jihadi”. Instead, I let Jihadis themselves identify the texts that are most representative of Jihadi ideology.

Lehet erőltetett párhuzamot látni egy radikális ulema és egy radikális bölcsész között, de úgy gondolom érdemes lenne Nielsen vizsgálatához hasonló módon elemezni a radikális jobboldal netes szövegeit és elkezdhetnénk empirikusan közelíteni ahhoz, hogy miért és hogyan radikalizálódnak a fiatalok a bölcsészkarokon.