Multilingual estimation of political-party positioning: From label aggregation to long-input Transformers

Dmitry Nikolaev, Tanise Ceron, Sebastian Padó


Abstract
Scaling analysis is a technique in computational political science that assigns a political actor (e.g. politician or party) a score on a predefined scale based on a (typically long) body of text (e.g. a parliamentary speech or an election manifesto). For example, political scientists have often used the left–right scale to systematically analyse political landscapes of different countries. NLP methods for automatic scaling analysis can find broad application provided they (i) are able to deal with long texts and (ii) work robustly across domains and languages. In this work, we implement and compare two approaches to automatic scaling analysis of political-party manifestos: label aggregation, a pipeline strategy relying on annotations of individual statements from the manifestos, and long-input-Transformer-based models, which compute scaling values directly from raw text. We carry out the analysis of the Comparative Manifestos Project dataset across 41 countries and 27 languages and find that the task can be efficiently solved by state-of-the-art models, with label aggregation producing the best results.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.591
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9497–9511
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.591
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.591
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dmitry Nikolaev, Tanise Ceron, and Sebastian Padó. 2023. Multilingual estimation of political-party positioning: From label aggregation to long-input Transformers. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9497–9511, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multilingual estimation of political-party positioning: From label aggregation to long-input Transformers (Nikolaev et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.591.pdf
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