Discovering Lobby-Parliamentarian Alignments through NLP

Aswin Suresh, Lazar Radojević, Francesco Salvi, Antoine Magron, Victor Kristof, Matthias Grossglauser


Abstract
We discover alignments of views between interest groups (lobbies) and members of the European Parliament (MEPs) by automatically analyzing their texts. Specifically, we do so by collecting novel datasets of lobbies’ position papers and MEPs’ speeches, and comparing these texts on the basis of semantic similarity and entailment. In the absence of ground-truth, we perform an indirect validation by comparing the discovered alignments with a dataset, which we curate, of retweet links between MEPs and lobbies, and with the publicly disclosed meetings of MEPs. Our best method performs significantly better than several baselines. Moreover, an aggregate analysis of the discovered alignments, between groups of related lobbies and political groups of MEPs, correspond to the expectations from the ideology of the groups (e.g., groups on the political left are more aligned with humanitarian and environmental organisations). We believe that this work is a step towards enhancing the transparency of the intricate decision-making processes within democratic institutions.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.448
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8100–8113
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.448
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aswin Suresh, Lazar Radojević, Francesco Salvi, Antoine Magron, Victor Kristof, and Matthias Grossglauser. 2024. Discovering Lobby-Parliamentarian Alignments through NLP. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8100–8113, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Discovering Lobby-Parliamentarian Alignments through NLP (Suresh et al., NAACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.448.pdf
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 2024.naacl-long.448.copyright.pdf