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Sentiment polarity classification is perhaps the most widely studied topic. It classifies an opinionated document as expressing a positive or negative opinion. In this paper, using movie review dataset, we perform a comparative study with…
Previous research indicates that race, ethnicity, and gender influence legislative behavior in important ways. The bulk of this research, however, focuses on the way these characteristics shape an individual legislator's behavior, making it…
A key component of understanding hand-object interactions is the ability to identify the active object -- the object that is being manipulated by the human hand. In order to accurately localize the active object, any method must reason…
Representative democracy in the United States relies on election systems that transmit votes into representatives in three key bodies: the two chambers of the federal legislature (House of Representatives and Senate) and the Electoral…
Confirmation bias and peer pressure both have substantial impacts on the formation of collective decisions. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to study how the interplay between these two mechanisms affects public opinion evolution.…
Consider the voter model on a box of side length $L$ (in the triangular lattice) with boundary votes fixed forever as type 0 or type 1 on two different halves of the boundary. Motivated by analogous questions in percolation, we study…
Voting power determines the "power" of individuals who cast votes; their power is based on their ability to influence the winning-ness of a coalition. Usually each individual acts alone, casting either all or none of their votes and is…
We develop a model of multiwinner elections that combines performance-based measures of the quality of the committee (such as, e.g., Borda scores of the committee members) with diversity constraints. Specifically, we assume that the…
There is a striking relationship between a three hundred years old Political Science theorem named "Condorcet's jury theorem" (1785), which states that majorities are more likely to choose correctly when individual votes are often correct…
In this paper, we examine the problem of building a user profile from a set of documents. This profile will consist of a subset of the most representative terms in the documents that best represent user preferences or interests. Inspired by…
I examine whether the imposition of fiduciary duty on municipal advisors affects bond yields and advising fees. Using a difference-in-differences analysis, I show that bond yields reduce by $\sim$9\% after the imposition of the SEC…
In an empirical study of persuasion, researchers often use a binary instrument to encourage individuals to consume information and take some action. We show that, with a binary Imbens-Angrist instrumental variable model and the monotone…
Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…
We measure bond and stock conditional return volatility as a function of changes in sentiment, proxied by six indicators from the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. We find that changes in sentiment affect conditional volatilities at different…
Criteria for a good voting system have been given particularly careful scrutiny in recent years, with general agreement that the core values are fair results, voter power and choice, and local representation. This paper reexamines the basic…
Examination of precinct level data in US presidential elections reveals a correlation of large precincts and increased fraction of Republican votes. The large precinct bias is analyzed with respect to voter heterogeneity and voter…
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
The outcomes of democratic elections rest on individuals' decision-making that is driven by their varying preferences and beliefs. Individuals may prefer consensus to gridlock, or gridlock to consensus, and information may be fractured via…
This study examines the influence of learning in a female teacher homeroom class in elementary school on pupils' voting behavior later in life, using independently collected individual-level data. Further, we evaluate its effect on…
Selectional preference learning methods have usually focused on word-to-class relations, e.g., a verb selects as its subject a given nominal class. This papers extends previous statistical models to class-to-class preferences, and presents…