Unsupervised Cross-Lingual Scaling of Political Texts

Goran Glavaš, Federico Nanni, Simone Paolo Ponzetto


Abstract
Political text scaling aims to linearly order parties and politicians across political dimensions (e.g., left-to-right ideology) based on textual content (e.g., politician speeches or party manifestos). Existing models scale texts based on relative word usage and cannot be used for cross-lingual analyses. Additionally, there is little quantitative evidence that the output of these models correlates with common political dimensions like left-to-right orientation. Experimental results show that the semantically-informed scaling models better predict the party positions than the existing word-based models in two different political dimensions. Furthermore, the proposed models exhibit no drop in performance in the cross-lingual compared to monolingual setting.
Anthology ID:
E17-2109
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Mirella Lapata, Phil Blunsom, Alexander Koller
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
688–693
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-2109
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Goran Glavaš, Federico Nanni, and Simone Paolo Ponzetto. 2017. Unsupervised Cross-Lingual Scaling of Political Texts. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers, pages 688–693, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unsupervised Cross-Lingual Scaling of Political Texts (Glavaš et al., EACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/E17-2109.pdf
Code
 gg42554/cl-scaling