19 research outputs found
Transfer Topic Labeling with Domain-Specific Knowledge Base: An Analysis of UK House of Commons Speeches 1935-2014
Topic models are widely used in natural language processing, allowing
researchers to estimate the underlying themes in a collection of documents.
Most topic models use unsupervised methods and hence require the additional
step of attaching meaningful labels to estimated topics. This process of manual
labeling is not scalable and suffers from human bias. We present a
semi-automatic transfer topic labeling method that seeks to remedy these
problems. Domain-specific codebooks form the knowledge-base for automated topic
labeling. We demonstrate our approach with a dynamic topic model analysis of
the complete corpus of UK House of Commons speeches 1935-2014, using the coding
instructions of the Comparative Agendas Project to label topics. We show that
our method works well for a majority of the topics we estimate; but we also
find that institution-specific topics, in particular on subnational governance,
require manual input. We validate our results using human expert coding
Multiplex Communities and the Emergence of International Conflict
Advances in community detection reveal new insights into multiplex and
multilayer networks. Less work, however, investigates the relationship between
these communities and outcomes in social systems. We leverage these advances to
shed light on the relationship between the cooperative mesostructure of the
international system and the onset of interstate conflict. We detect
communities based upon weaker signals of affinity expressed in United Nations
votes and speeches, as well as stronger signals observed across multiple layers
of bilateral cooperation. Communities of diplomatic affinity display an
expected negative relationship with conflict onset. Ties in communities based
upon observed cooperation, however, display no effect under a standard model
specification and a positive relationship with conflict under an alternative
specification. These results align with some extant hypotheses but also point
to a paucity in our understanding of the relationship between community
structure and behavioral outcomes in networks.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1802.0039
Deep Learning for Political Science
Political science, and social science in general, have traditionally been using computational methods to study areas such as voting behavior, policy making, international conflict, and international development. More recently, increasingly available quantities of data are being combined with improved algorithms and affordable computational resources to predict, learn, and discover new insights from data that is large in volume and variety. New developments in the areas of machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), and, more generally, artificial intelligence (AI) are opening up new opportunities for testing theories and evaluating the impact of interventions and programs in a more dynamic and effective way. Applications using large volumes of structured and unstructured data are becoming common in government and industry, and increasingly also in social science research. This chapter offers an introduction to such methods drawing examples from political science. Focusing on the areas where the strengths of the methods coincide with challenges in these fields, the chapter first presents an introduction to AI and its core technology - machine learning, with its rapidly developing subfield of deep learning. The discussion of deep neural networks is illustrated with the NLP tasks that are relevant to political science. The latest advances in deep learning methods for NLP are also reviewed, together with their potential for improving information extraction and pattern recognition from political science texts
Big Data and AI – A transformational shift for government: So, what next for research?
Big Data and artificial intelligence will have a profound transformational impact on governments around the world. Thus, it is important for scholars to provide a useful analysis on the topic to public managers and policymakers. This study offers an in-depth review of the Policy and Administration literature on the role of Big Data and advanced analytics in the public sector. It provides an overview of the key themes in the research field, namely the application and benefits of Big Data throughout the policy process, and challenges to its adoption and the resulting implications for the public sector. It is argued that research on the subject is still nascent and more should be done to ensure that the theory adds real value to practitioners. A critical assessment of the strengths and limitations of the existing literature is developed, and a future research agenda to address these gaps and enrich our understanding of the topic is proposed
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Replication Data for Intra-Cabinet Politics and Fiscal Governance in Times of Austerity
In the context of recent economic and financial crisis in Europe, questions about the power of the core executive to control fiscal outcomes are more important than ever. Why are some governments more effective in controlling spending while others fall prey to excessive overspending by individual cabinet ministers? We approach this question by lifting the veil of collective cabinet responsibility and focusing on intra-cabinet decision making around budgetary allocation. Using the contributions of individual cabinet members during budget debates in Ireland, we estimate their positions on a latent dimension that represents their relative levels of support or opposition to the cabinet leadership. We find some evidence that ministers who are close to the finance minister receive a larger budget share, but under worsening macro-economic conditions closeness to the prime minister is a better predictor for budget allocations. Our results highlight potential fragility of the fiscal authority delegation mechanism in adverse economic environment
Predicting Energy Customer Vulnerability Using Smart Meter Data
Supporting vulnerable consumers and reducing fuel poverty are major priorities for policy makers in the energy sector. With the availability of streaming data from smart meters we are able to develop simple and reliable methods of identifying vulnerable energy customers and as a result develop targeted policy interventions. This study investigates how vulnerable customers can be identified from natural gas consumption data. Neural networks, random forest, naive Bayes, and support vector machines were assessed for classification of consumer vulnerability. Random forest, with the prediction accuracy of 94.6 percent, outperforms other prediction models. Our study provides additional evidence that machine learning methods can be deployed by policymakers and insights teams to predict vulnerability from patterns of consumer behaviour