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On 31 July 2023, Rebeka Kiss attended the Conference on Data Science and Law, hosted by Fordham University (co-organised with ETH Zurich and the University of Virginia) in New York, where she presented her research entitled “How to quantify legal interpretation? Text mining approach with data from Hungary”. The conference’s purpose was to convene researchers across disciplines interested in the burgeoning field of Data Science and Law. Scholars from various backgrounds, including law, social and behavioural sciences, digital humanities, computer science, machine learning, and data analytics, were invited to present their works-in-progress in empirical legal studies involving big data sources or data science techniques like natural language processing machine learning, algorithmic fairness, topic modeling, or network analysis.

On 18 July 2023, Rebeka Kiss attended the Second Annual Opposition Studies Conference in London, hosted by the Centre for Opposition Studies with the Centre for British Politics and Government, King’s College London. The event centred around topics relating to the study of political opposition from disciplines including political studies, political science, and history, focusing on the UK and Europe. Rebeka Kiss’s presentation was entitled “Do MPs justify the draft laws submitted to the parliament? – An empirical analysis of evidence-based decision-making and the quality of explanatory notes.”

The Centre for Social Sciences has recently won 2 grants, in which our senior researcher Orsonya Ring is going to participate. Congratulations! The grants are the following: Moral emotions in politics – how they unite, how they divide (MORES) – Zsolt Boda Grievance Politics and Democracy (PLEDGE) – Gabriella Szabó

On July 4th and 5th, Miklós Sebők (along with work package co-leader Sven-Oliver Proksch and Christian Rauh) presented the final results of Work Package 5 (“Parliamentary, government and legal texts”) of the OPTED project. A preview of the upcoming release of the ParlLAwSpeech dataset was also provided at the event held at the University of Vienna. OPTED’s website is available here: https://opted.eu/

On 26 June 2023, Rebeka Kiss attended the Tag der Parlamentsforschung – Day of Parliamentary Research conference organised by the Österreichisches Parlament in Vienna. The presentation entitled “Copy and paste explanatory notes? Text reuse approach with data from Hungary” gave insight into some preliminary empirical results related to her thesis.

The University of Antwerp hosted the 15th Annual CAP Conference between June 27 and 29, 2023. At the conference, Miklós Sebők presented two papers in the “Methodological Advancements” section.  The two papers are entitled “Introducing the CAP BABEL MACHINE: A state-of-the-art AI solution for automated CAP coding”, and “Assessing the Policy Agenda of U.S. Presidential Speeches – A Sentence-Level Deep Learning Approach” (co-authored by Ákos Máté and Amnon Cavari). He also presented the CAP Babel Machine service (babel.poltextlab.com) of poltextLAB in the plenary session.

A new paper titled “HunEmBERT: a fine-tuned BERT-model for classifying sentiment and emotion in political communication,” authored by István Üveges and Orsolya Ring, was published in IEEE Access, a Q1 (Scimago), IF 3.467 journal in the field of computer science, on June 13, 2023. The article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3285536 The PDF version can be found here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10149341

The journal article by Miklós Sebők, Rebeka Kiss and Ádám Kovács has been published in Parliamentary Affairs on June 12, 2023, entitled The Concept and Measurement of Legislative Backsliding. The article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsad014 The PDF version can be found here: https://academic.oup.com/pa/advance-article-pdf/doi/10.1093/pa/gsad014/50576067/gsad014.pdf

This year’s call for proposals for the MTA’s Momentum Programme received 108 valid proposals, 27 in the humanities and social sciences, 40 in the life sciences and 41 in the mathematical and natural sciences. Based on the peer review, the recommendations of the Momentum Jury and the Momentum Committee, the President of the Academy decided on 31 May 2023 on the ranking of excellence and the amounts of funding to be awarded to the research teams to be supported. As a result, a new Lendület research group will be established at the Centre for Social Sciences (CSS), Budapest, led by Miklós Sebők. The five-year project, funded with over EUR 560 000, is entitled: “The changing global relations of the Visegrad countries in times of war – An artificial intelligence-assisted comparative analysis”. Dr Sebők is a research professor at the Institute of Political Science CSS, and the National Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence at CSS, as well as the principal investigator of poltextLAB (poltextlab.com), a research lab dedicated to text mining and artificial intelligence applications in the social sciences. The project will extend the lab’s machine learning-based analysis of public policy agendas to the history and current data sources of the Visegrad countries after 1990, with the help of the lab’s collaborators and national and international partners.

The European Consurtium for Political Research (ECPR) has recognized the following poltextLAB publication with an honourable mention: Miklós Sebők, Bálint György Kubik, Csaba Molnár, István Péter Járay, Anna Székely:Measuring legislative stability: a new approach with data from Hungary (You can read the journal article here.) The Jacqui Briggs EPS Prize is awarded for an article that makes a substantial contribution to the field of political science, especially articles that contribute to the understanding of new and innovative trends in political science or to innovative approaches to teaching and learning in the profession.