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The Artificial Intelligence National Laboratory of the Centre for Social Sciences (CSS AI LAB-TK MILAB, https://milab.tk.hu/en) launches a call for applications inviting internationally acclaimed foreign researchers for a period of 1–8 months to conduct research in Hungary. More information is available here.

The Parliamentary Data for a Better Democracy forum, organized by the OPTED network was held successfully on June 15th in Brussels. The forum featured 16 speakers who covered different aspects and practices in relation to sharing and analyzing parliamentary text data.

Members of PoltextLAB attended a conference of the COMPTEXT international text mining network in Dublin from 6 to 7 May. Miklós Sebők is a member of the conference’s organizing committee. Prior to the conference, Ákos Máté held a workshop on May 5 entitled “Data Visualization using ggplot2”. At the COMPTEXT conference, poltextLAB researches was presented at the following presentations: Sebők Miklós – Máté Ákos: Solving Multi-class Classification for Low Resource Languages with Large Language Models Máté Ákos – Barczikay Tamás:European Central Bank communication during crises: ditching the boilerplate? Péter Gelányi – Orsolya RingIdentifying the relation between parliamentary speeches and coalition building in Hungary with text mining Orsolya Ring ( – Krzysztof Rybinski):A big data analysis of International Organizations legitimation in the media in post-socialist countries The conference program is available here.

The head of poltextLAB presented his latest results on empirical text mining of legislation, including research on the legislative stability index, which is based on an automated, dictionary-based text mining approach to the analysis of law amendment-type relations (Sebők, M. – Kubik, B. Gy. – Molnár, Cs. – Járay, I. – Székely, A. (2022): Measuring legislative stability – A new approach with data from Hungary. In: European Political Science).

A new article by Miklós Sebők, Bálint György Kubik, Csaba Molnár, István Járay and Anna Székely was published in the European Political Science journal. The title of the article is Measuring legislative stability: a new approach with data from Hungary. “While the stability of legislation is one of the fundamental issues in political theory, comparative and quantitative analyses on the subject are in short supply in the political science literature. In this article, we propose a novel measurement scheme for legislative stability, and we also introduce a Legislative Stability Index (LSI) developed to this end. In terms of empirical evidence, our index relies on the number of legislative amendments adopted within the span of an electoral cycle, as well as the breadth of issues the amendments touch on. It is based on the frequency with which laws are amended after their adoption. Our approach uses a new law-amendment edge-type network for a new Hungarian legislative database. Amendment-type connections are discovered by an automated dictionary-based text mining method.“ If you would like to continue reading the article, you can find it on this link.

On 7 February 2022, Miklós Sebők participated inthe third European Language Resource Coordination workshop in Hungary. The workshop tried to find answers to questions about what kind of language tools we have in the market and academic sphere, or in the public administration. Developers, integrators and users of Language Technology, shared experiences, requirements, and ways for transforming digital interaction in the age of AI. “Language Technology is shaping our multilingual future. It has already been transforming the way we interact with our devices and with each other, the way we shop, work and travel. More and more it reshapes our interaction with service providers, either public or private. Programs that automatically correct spelling errors and aid sophisticated writing, digital assistants that transform our voices to text messages on mobile phones, bots that answer our calls to the bank or to our social security organisation, systems that automatically translate from a foreign language, and much more, are already empowering our everyday lives, our businesses and our administrations. But can we fully use our own language in our digital interactions? Is our language adequately supported and ready to keep pace with the technological advancements of the AI era? ” If you’re interested, you can find the programme and some of the presentations from the workshop by clicking on this link.

The new article by Tomaž Erjavec, Maciej Ogrodniczuk et al. (Orsolya Ring): The ParlaMint corpora of parliamentary proceedings is published in the Language Resources and Evaluation. DOI: 10.1007/s10579-021-09574-0

A new article was published in the Journal of Public Policy by Miklós Sebők, Ágnes M. Balázs and Csaba Molnár.   The title of the article is Punctuated equilibrium and progressive friction in socialist autocracy, democracy and hybrid regimes. “The analysis of public policy agendas in comparative politics has been somewhat limited in terms of geography, time frame and political system, with studies on full-blown autocracies and hybrid regimes few and far between. This article addresses this gap by comparing policy dynamics in three Hungarian regimes over 73 years. Besides our theoretical contribution related to policy-making in Socialist autocracy and illiberal democracy, we also test hypotheses related to non-democratic regimes. We find that – similarly to developed democracies – policy agendas in autocracies are mostly stable with occasional but large-scale “punctuations”. Our data also confirms that these punctuations are more pronounced in non-democratic polities.” If you would like to continue reading, click on this link and enjoy the article!

The journal article by Miklós Sebők, Zoltán Kacsuk, Ákos Máté has been published in the Quality & Quantity journal on December 17, 2021, entitled “The (real) need for a human touch: testing a human-machine hybrid topic classification workflow on a New York Times corpus”. The article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-021-01287-4The PDF version can be found here: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11135-021-01287-4 .pdf

The Political Analysis is the official journal of the Society for Political Methodology and the Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association. The PA recognizes someone as the “reviewer of the month” every month to highlight the hard work they do. November 2021’s reviewer of the month is Miklós Sebők at Political Analysis.