Align Voting Behavior with Public Statements for Legislator Representation Learning
Xinyi Mou, Zhongyu Wei, Lei Chen, Shangyi Ning, Yancheng He, Changjian Jiang, Xuanjing Huang
Abstract
Ideology of legislators is typically estimated by ideal point models from historical records of votes. It represents legislators and legislation as points in a latent space and shows promising results for modeling voting behavior. However, it fails to capture more specific attitudes of legislators toward emerging issues and is unable to model newly-elected legislators without voting histories. In order to mitigate these two problems, we explore to incorporate both voting behavior and public statements on Twitter to jointly model legislators. In addition, we propose a novel task, namely hashtag usage prediction to model the ideology of legislators on Twitter. In practice, we construct a heterogeneous graph for the legislative context and use relational graph neural networks to learn the representation of legislators with the guidance of historical records of their voting and hashtag usage. Experiment results indicate that our model yields significant improvements for the task of roll call vote prediction. Further analysis further demonstrates that legislator representation we learned captures nuances in statements.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.acl-long.99
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
- Venues:
- ACL | IJCNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1236–1246
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.99
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.99
- Cite (ACL):
- Xinyi Mou, Zhongyu Wei, Lei Chen, Shangyi Ning, Yancheng He, Changjian Jiang, and Xuanjing Huang. 2021. Align Voting Behavior with Public Statements for Legislator Representation Learning. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1236–1246, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Align Voting Behavior with Public Statements for Legislator Representation Learning (Mou et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2021.acl-long.99.pdf