Text Mining from Party Manifestos to Support the Design of Online Voting Advice Applications

Voting advice applications (VAA) allow potential voters to compare their own policy positions to political parties running for an election. One of the key design elements of a VAA are the policy statements representing the political space covered by political parties. VAA designers face the challenge of coming up with policy statements in a short time frame. Even with medium-sized corpora of texts such as party manifestos, the formulation and selection of policy statements serving as a stimulus in the VAA is a tedious and time-consuming task. In addition, there is the risk of human selection bias. This study proposes a system to aid VAA designers in policy statement selection and formulation. The system uses the BERT language model with semantic similarity calculation to mine party manifesto sentences that are relevant to already existing VAA statements. For the experiments, VAA statements stemming from the 2021 elections and party manifestos issued for the previous two Japanese elections were used. To expand the policy space, VAA statements from the 2019 European Parliament elections were added. Results show that the proposed system is able to analyze large amounts of text in a short time, and mines text that provides practical support for designing and improving VAAs

Using Open Government Data to Facilitate the Design of Voting Advice Applications

In the process of statement selection for online voting advice applications (VAAs) a considerable amount of time is spent for analyzing the domestic and foreign policies of a given country. However, harnessing large amounts of available open data, which would be useful in this design process, manually is impractical. In order to facilitate such time-consuming and labor-intensive work, the authors propose a system to assist VAA designers formulating policy statements. Using advanced language modeling and text summarization techniques and based on open government data related to politics during the legislature preceding an election, the system produces suggestions applicable for revising or creating new VAA policy statements. Experiments conducted on VAA and e-petition data from Taiwan show that the proposed system can generate meaningful suggestions for VAA designers and could therefore help reducing the cost of the VAA design process

Controlled Spintronic Emitter of THz Radiation on an Atomically Thin WS₂/Silicon Substrate

The control and monitoring of the polarization of terahertz radiation are of interest for numerous applications. Here we present a simple controllable THz emitter with a small coercive magnetic field. It is based on a Co/WS2/silicon structure, in which the presence of uniaxial magnetic anisotropy caused by mechanical stress in a ferromagnetic film was found. Our results show that a ferromagnet/semiconductor emitter can become a technologically simple device for terahertz spintronics