相关论文: Computational analysis of US Congressional speeche…

The spread of online misinformation on social media is increasingly perceived as a problem for societal cohesion and democracy. The role of political leaders in this process has attracted less research attention, even though politicians who…

The pursuit of truth is central to democratic deliberation and governance, yet political discourse reflects varying epistemic orientations, ranging from evidence-based reasoning grounded in verifiable information to intuition-based…

Argumentation accommodates various rhetorical devices, such as questions, reported speech, and imperatives. These rhetorical tools usually assert argumentatively relevant propositions rather implicitly, so understanding their true meaning…

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…

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…

Language is not only used to transmit neutral information; we often seek to persuade by arguing in favor of a particular view. Persuasion raises a number of challenges for classical accounts of belief updating, as information cannot be…

There is a widespread belief that the tone of US political language has become more negative recently, in particular when Donald Trump entered politics. At the same time, there is disagreement as to whether Trump changed or merely continued…

Judicial opinions once considered sound can lose relevance over time. Yet, little has been known, both systematically and at scale, about how judicial reasoning has evolved. Here, we analyze four million US court decisions from 1800 to…

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 investigate whether one can determine from the transcripts of U.S. Congressional floor debates whether the speeches represent support of or opposition to proposed legislation. To address this problem, we exploit the fact that these…

Discourse signals are often implicit, leaving it up to the interpreter to draw the required inferences. At the same time, discourse is embedded in a social context, meaning that interpreters apply their own assumptions and beliefs when…

As the most public component of the Supreme Court's decision-making process, oral argument receives an out-sized share of attention in the popular media. Despite its prominence, however, the basic function and operation of oral argument as…

To many statisticians and citizens, the outcome of the most recent U.S. presidential election represents a failure of data-driven methods on the grandest scale. This impression has led to much debate and discussion about how the election…

Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…

Implicit content plays a crucial role in political discourse, where speakers systematically employ pragmatic strategies such as implicatures and presuppositions to influence their audiences. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are a transformational technology, fundamentally changing how people obtain information and interact with the world. As people become increasingly reliant on them for an enormous variety of tasks, a body of…

There have been numerous studies evaluating bias of LLMs towards political topics. However, how positions towards these topics in model outputs are highly sensitive to the prompt. What happens when the prompt itself is suggestive of certain…

Participants in political discourse employ rhetorical strategies -- such as hedging, attributions, or denials -- to display varying degrees of belief commitments to claims proposed by themselves or others. Traditionally, political…

Explanations are a fundamental element of how people make sense of the political world. Citizens routinely ask and answer questions about why events happen, who is responsible, and what could or should be done differently. Yet despite their…

When people interpret text, they rely on inferences that go beyond the observed language itself. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a method for the analysis of text that takes implicitly communicated content explicitly into…