相关论文: Get out the vote: Determining support or oppositio…
There has been a growing body of study on the relationship between public/political discourse and its moral-emotional foundations. Most of the studies, however, have been confined to a single country's context, lacking cross-cultural…
Social Media have been extensively used for commercial and political communication, besides their initial scope of providing an easy-to-use outlet to produce and consume user-generated content. Besides being a popular medium, Social Media…
The strength with which a statement is made can have a significant impact on the audience. For example, international relations can be strained by how the media in one country describes an event in another; and papers can be rejected…
We propose a data storage and analysis method for using the US Congressional record as a policy analysis tool. We use Amazon Web Services and the Solr search engine to store and process Congressional record data from 1789 to the present,…
Social consensus is important for society. Sometimes the success of society depends on a consensus (e.g. the decision to pay taxes or to commit to the constitution). Examples for continuous opinion dynamics are discussions about tax rates…
Displaying a written transcript of what a human said (i.e. producing an "automatic speech recognition transcript") is a common feature for smartphone vocal assistants: the utterance produced by a human speaker (e.g. a question) is displayed…
Optimizing the phrasing of argumentative text is crucial in higher education and professional development. However, assessing whether and how the different claims in a text should be revised is a hard task, especially for novice writers. In…
Conflicts between the executive and legislative powers are a common, and even expected, characteristic of presidential systems, with some governments being more successful in the activity of obtaining support from the Congress than others.…
Online debate forums provide users a platform to express their opinions on controversial topics while being exposed to opinions from diverse set of viewpoints. Existing work in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has shown that linguistic…
The first step in discourse analysis involves dividing a text into segments. We annotate the first high-quality small-scale medical corpus in English with discourse segments and analyze how well news-trained segmenters perform on this…
The use of language-model-based question-answering systems to aid humans in completing difficult tasks is limited, in part, by the unreliability of the text these systems generate. Using hard multiple-choice reading comprehension questions…
Text segmentation is important for signaling a document's structure. Without segmenting a long document into topically coherent sections, it is difficult for readers to comprehend the text, let alone find important information. The problem…
Even in the relatively favorable circumstances of an individual interview, accurate listening requires careful effort. Our research interests dictate which student statements we attend to during the interview, and which we consider to…
This paper addresses the problem of summarizing decisions in spoken meetings: our goal is to produce a concise {\it decision abstract} for each meeting decision. We explore and compare token-level and dialogue act-level automatic…
In many real-life situations that involve exchanges of arguments, individuals may differ on their assessment of which supports between the arguments are in fact justified, i.e., they put forward different support-relations. When confronted…
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…
In this paper we provide evidence that a virtual model of U.S. congresspersons based on a collection of language models satisfies the definition of a digital twin. In particular, we introduce and provide high-level descriptions of a…
Changing someone's opinion is arguably one of the most important challenges of social interaction. The underlying process proves difficult to study: it is hard to know how someone's opinions are formed and whether and how someone's views…
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…
Using lobbying data from OpenSecrets.org, we offer several experiments applying machine learning techniques to predict if a piece of legislation (US bill) has been subjected to lobbying activities or not. We also investigate the influence…