Related papers: Get out the vote: Determining support or oppositio…
With the increasing usage of the internet, more and more data is being digitized including parliamentary debates but they are in an unstructured format. There is a need to convert them into a structured format for linguistic analysis. Much…
In the U.S. Congress, legislators can use active and passive cosponsorship to support bills. We show that these two types of cosponsorship are driven by two different motivations: the backing of political colleagues and the backing of the…
Developing tools to automatically detect check-worthy claims in political debates and speeches can greatly help moderators of debates, journalists, and fact-checkers. While previous work on this problem has focused exclusively on the text…
Questions in political interviews and hearings serve strategic purposes beyond information gathering including advancing partisan narratives and shaping public perceptions. However, these strategic aspects remain understudied due to the…
Pursuit of honest and truthful decision-making is crucial for governance and accountability in democracies. However, people sometimes take different perspectives of what it means to be honest and how to pursue truthfulness. Here we explore…
We analyze publicly available US Supreme Court documents using automated stance detection. In the first phase of our work, we investigate the extent to which the Court's public-facing language is political. We propose and calculate two…
An educated and informed consumption of media content has become a challenge in modern times. With the shift from traditional news outlets to social media and similar venues, a major concern is that readers are becoming encapsulated in…
Online discussion platforms are a vital part of the public discourse in a deliberative democracy. However, how to interpret the outcomes of the discussions on these platforms is often unclear. In this paper, we propose a novel and…
Parliamentary and legislative debate transcripts provide access to information concerning the opinions, positions and policy preferences of elected politicians. They attract attention from researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds,…
Case Law has a significant impact on the proceedings of legal cases. Therefore, the information that can be obtained from previous court cases is valuable to lawyers and other legal officials when performing their duties. This paper…
In this article, we are interested in the annotation of transcriptions of human-human dialogue taken from meeting records. We first propose a meeting content model where conversational acts are interpreted with respect to their…
Arguments are essential objects in DirectDemocracyP2P, where they can occur both in association with signatures for petitions, or in association with other debated decisions, such as bug sorting by importance. The arguments of a signer on a…
Each year, the United States Congress considers thousands of legislative proposals to select bills to present to the US President to sign into law. Naturally, the decision processes of members of Congress are subject to peer influence. In…
Public debates are a common platform for presenting and juxtaposing diverging views on important issues. In this work we propose a methodology for tracking how ideas flow between participants throughout a debate. We use this approach in a…
Humans engage in informal debates on a daily basis. By expressing their opinions and ideas in an argumentative fashion, they are able to gain a deeper understanding of a given problem and in some cases, find the best possible course of…
Political polarization in public space can seriously hamper the function and the integrity of contemporary democratic societies. In this paper, we propose a novel measure of such polarization, which, by way of simple topic modelling,…
We propose new methods of electoral statistics. With their help, we study transcripts of vote counting in municipal elections. We construct and apply effective statistical tests to detect the ballot stuffing at the level of individual…
The increasing digitization of political speech has opened the door to studying a new dimension of political behavior using text analysis. This work investigates the value of word-level statistical data from the US Congressional…
Ideological leanings of an individual can often be gauged by the sentiment one expresses about different issues. We propose a simple framework that represents a political ideology as a distribution of sentiment polarities towards a set of…
In this report we present a system that can generate political speeches for a desired political party. Furthermore, the system allows to specify whether a speech should hold a supportive or opposing opinion. The system relies on a…