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Professors study changes in legislative speech
(Nov 2005) Associate Professors Steven Abney and Dragomir Radev of the School of Information are part of a research project that aims to recognize the subtle nuances of legislators' words in an effort to better extract information from official records of governing bodies.
Radev and Abney are co-principal investigators of the University of Michigan grant, funded with $750,000 from the National Science Foundation. Burt Monroe, an adjunct faculty associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research and an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University, is principal investigator.
By examining records, the researchers hope to create not only a more efficient way to find information presented in legislative bodies as they deliberate, but a better understanding of the very language used by legislators themselves in their discussions.
The broader impact of this multidisciplinary, international project includes enhanced scientific infrastructure in the form of new software and data for the study of politics and language. It will also enhance infrastructures for monitoring what are now impossibly large records of democratic institutions, and create new statistical and computational techniques for analyzing large-scale textual databases.
Researchers say their work will ultimately lead to an increased ability to understand and forecast political and policy changes around the world as well as to a greater understanding of how language affects politics, and vice versa, and how the interactions between them affect democracy.
Legislative speech differs by such factors as political party, gender, and the gravity of the events under discussion. Verbatim records of democratic legislatures represent a source of untapped information of unique importance for the study of both democratic societies and language.
"For linguists, there is no other place where they have a systematic minute-by-minute record of the spoken word exchanged by a slowly changing and overlapping set of individuals over significant lengths of time," Radev says.
For political scientists, legislatures are also unique sources of deliberations about the issues of the day. "As such, legislative records provide exceptional opportunities for studying the dynamics of language and rhetoric, of democratic politics and representation, and of their interactions, over time scales ranging from minutes to centuries," Abney notes. Abney's work will focus on the application of information extraction technology to parliamentary records.
The record of a single legislature can, however, run to thousands of pages in a single day. It is impossible for any one person to read, much less absorb or analyze, the entire record of a legislature as quickly as it is produced. Increasing availability of these records in electronic form, however, opens possibilities for various forms of computerized analysis.
This multidisciplinary project applies and advances recent developments in computer science, information science, and statistics -- for natural language processing in particular and statistical learning from massive databases in general -- to the analysis of legislative records from democracies worldwide, illuminating important questions of dynamics of political representation and political rhetoric.
Other co-principal investigators are Kevin Quinn of Harvard University and Michael Colaresi of Michigan State.
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Steven Abney
Dragomir Radev
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