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We compare policy differences across institutions by embedding representations of the entire legal corpus of each institution and the vocabulary shared across all corpora into a continuous vector space. We apply our method, Gov2Vec, to…
The related concepts of partisan belief systems, issue alignment, and partisan sorting are central to our understanding of politics. These phenomena have been studied using measures of alignment between pairs of topics, or how much…
Teaching collaborative argumentation is an advanced skill that many K-12 teachers struggle to develop. To address this, we have developed Discussion Tracker, a classroom discussion analytics system based on novel algorithms for classifying…
The polarization of political opinions among members of the U.S. legislative chambers measured by their voting records is greater today than it was thirty years ago. Previous research efforts to find causes of such increase have suggested…
We use an extract from an interview concerning gravitational wave physics to show that the meaning of hesitancies within speech are different when spoken and when read from the corresponding transcript. When used in speech, hesitancies can…
A quantitative representation of discourse structure can be computed by measuring lexical cohesion relations among adjacent blocks of text. These representations have been proposed to deal with sub-topic text segmentation. In a parallel…
We identify agreement and disagreement between utterances that express stances towards a topic of discussion. Existing methods focus mainly on conversational settings, where dialogic features are used for (dis)agreement inference. We extend…
We present work on deception detection, where, given a spoken claim, we aim to predict its factuality. While previous work in the speech community has relied on recordings from staged setups where people were asked to tell the truth or to…
Understanding who blames or supports whom in news text is a critical research question in computational social science. Traditional methods and datasets for sentiment analysis are, however, not suitable for the domain of political text as…
Persuasion and argumentation are possibly among the most complex examples of the interplay between multiple human subjects. With the advent of the Internet, online forums provide wide platforms for people to share their opinions and…
Cooperation in the form of vote trading, also known as logrolling, is central for law-making processes, shaping the development of democratic societies. Empirical evidence of logrolling is scarce and limited to highly specific situations…
Sentiment analysis gets increasing attention in software engineering with new tools emerging from new insights provided by researchers. Existing use cases and tools are meant to be used for textual communication such as comments on…
Stance detection is identifying expressed beliefs in a document. While researchers widely use sentiment analysis for this, recent research demonstrates that sentiment and stance are distinct. This paper advances text analysis methods by…
Parliamentary transcripts provide a valuable resource to understand the reality and know about the most important facts that occur over time in our societies. Furthermore, the political debates captured in these transcripts facilitate…
Using FOMC transcripts and customized deep learning models, we quantify ``hidden dissent'', or disagreement in the FOMC that is unobserved in formal votes. We find hidden dissent to be prevalent and systematically driven by macroeconomic…
Online communities provide ample opportunities for user self-expression but generally lack the means for average users to exercise direct control over community policies. This paper sets out to identify a set of strategies and techniques…
The process of debating is essential in our daily lives, whether in studying, work activities, simple everyday discussions, political debates on TV, or online discussions on social networks. The range of uses for debates is broad. Due to…
In sentiment analysis, the polarities of the opinions expressed on an object/feature are determined to assess the sentiment of a sentence or document whether it is positive/negative/neutral. Naturally, the object/feature is a noun…
Quoted speech is often set off by punctuation marks, in particular quotation marks. Thus, it might seem that the quotation marks would be extremely useful in identifying these structures in texts. Unfortunately, the situation is not quite…
Modern political interaction is characterized by strong partisanship and a lack of interest in information sharing and agreement across party lines. It remains largely unclear how such partisan echo chambers arise and how they coevolve with…