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Even though fine-tuned neural language models have been pivotal in enabling "deep" automatic text analysis, optimizing text representations for specific applications remains a crucial bottleneck. In this study, we look at this problem in…
Automated text analysis has become a widely used tool in political science. In this research, we use a BERT model trained on German party manifestos to identify the individual parties' contribution to the coalition agreement of 2021.
The rise of populism concerns many political scientists and practitioners, yet the detection of its underlying language remains fragmentary. This paper aims to provide a reliable, valid, and scalable approach to measure populist stances.…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly shaping citizens' information ecosystems. Products incorporating LLMs, such as chatbots and AI Companions, are now widely used for decision support and information retrieval, including in…
This study investigates political discourse in the German parliament, the Bundestag, by analyzing approximately 28,000 parliamentary speeches from the last five years. Two machine learning models for topic and sentiment classification were…
Mutual coherence is a measure of similarity between two opinions. Although the notion comes from philosophy, it is essential for a wide range of technologies, e.g., the Wahl-O-Mat system. In Germany, this system helps voters to find…
As social media has permeated large parts of the population it simultaneously has become a way to reach many people e.g. with political messages. One way to efficiently reach those people is the application of automated computer programs…
Within this paper we develop and apply new methodology adequately including undecided voters for the 2021 German federal election. Due to a cooperation with the polling institute Civey, we are in the fortunate position to obtain data in…
Automatic extraction of party (dis)similarities from texts such as party election manifestos or parliamentary speeches plays an increasing role in computational political science. However, existing approaches are fundamentally limited to…
Assessing political conversations in social media requires a deeper understanding of the underlying practices and styles that drive these conversations. In this paper, we present a computational approach for assessing online conversational…
Reliable methods for automatic readability assessment have the potential to impact a variety of fields, ranging from machine translation to self-informed learning. Recently, large language models for the German language (such as GBERT and…
Mapping political party systems to metric policy spaces is one of the major methodological problems in political science. At present, in most political science project this task is performed by domain experts relying on purely qualitative…
The application of natural language processing on political texts as well as speeches has become increasingly relevant in political sciences due to the ability to analyze large text corpora which cannot be read by a single person. But such…
This paper presents a computational case study that evaluates the capabilities of specialized machine learning models and emerging multimodal large language models for Visual Political Communication (VPC) analysis. Focusing on concentrated…
In recent research, large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly used to investigate public opinions. This study investigates the algorithmic fidelity of LLMs, i.e., the ability to replicate the socio-cultural context and nuanced…
This thesis explores the ways by how people express their opinions on German Twitter, examines current approaches to automatic mining of these feelings, and proposes novel methods, which outperform state-of-the-art techniques. For this…
During the last fifteen years, automatic text scaling has become one of the key tools of the Text as Data community in political science. Prominent text scaling algorithms, however, rely on the assumption that latent positions can be…
Determining and measuring diversity in news articles is important for a number of reasons, including preventing filter bubbles and fueling public discourse, especially before elections. So far, the identification and analysis of diversity…
Political advertising on social media has become a central element in election campaigns. However, granular information about political advertising on social media was previously unavailable, thus raising concerns regarding fairness,…
In this study, we examine the reliability of AI-based Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) and large language models (LLMs) in providing objective political information. Our analysis is based upon a comparison with party responses to 38…