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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.

The long-term objective of WP5 within the OPTED project is to compile a database which provides a comprehensive, easy-to-use collection of legislative speeches and legislative documents covering all EU member countries, the most important EU institutions, as well as the United Kingdom and Israel. With the contribution of Miklós Sebők, Soks-Oliver Proksch, Christian Rauh, Anna Székely, Ágnes Dinnyés, Eszter Lancsár, Jan Schwalbach, Alexander Dalheimer, the core product of this half year period is an inventory in the form of a spreadsheet which provides an overview of already existing collections of legislative texts. The researchers collected data from all available sources, such as parliamentary websites and secondary sources created by scholars or NGOs. They identified the set of currently available sources – covering both primary archives and secondary data collections – by reviewing relevant academic literature, by scoping extant linguistic infrastructures (such as CLARIN), and by surveying the computational social science community via social media. For further information, visit the official website of OPTED.

The Text Mining and Artificial Intelligence Training Program (foundation course) was successfully held between the 11th and 12th of November, 2021 with 25 participants. The program introduced the theoretical and practical foundations of the social science applications of text mining and artificial intelligence, and provided participants with the opportunity to complete a mini-project.

A text mining and artificial intelligence training program (introductory course) will be introducing the theoretical and practical foundations of the social science applications of text mining and artificial intelligence and provide the participants with the opportunity to complete a mini-project. The course will be held from 11 to 12 November 2021 in a 3×1.5 hour frame (9: 00-10: 30, 10: 45-12: 15 and 13: 15-14: 45) in the HTK K013-14 meeting room, performed by Miklós Sebők, Ákos Máté, Orsolya Ring and Péter István Járay.