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Call for Papers: Studying Central-Eastern European Politics in the Age of AI – A Workshop on Data and Methods

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CALL FOR PAPERS Studying Central-Eastern European Politics in the Age of AI  – A Workshop on Data and Methods  Background and scope The aim of the workshop is to bring together a diverse group of political, policy, communication, and legal scholars as well as computational social scientists and linguists working on the data-centered analysis of the politics and international relations of Central-Eastern Europe (CEE). This regional scope mainly covers the four Visegrad countries, but work related to the Balkans, the Baltic states, Central European, and Eastern European countries will also be considered.  We are particularly interested in presentations relying on a text-as-data framework (Cardie and Wilkerson, 2008; Monroe and Schrodt, 2008; Wilkerson and Casas, 2017; Grimmer and Stewart, 2013), and those applying cutting-edge quantitative and/or artificial intelligence-supported methodology to quantify and evaluate policy agendas in the region (see e.g. studies associated with the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP), following the research agenda presented in Baumgartner, Breunig, and Grossman (2019).  Data presentations will mainly focus on collections featuring text data from 1990 on (although historical datasets will also be considered) including parliamentary, executive/presidential/government/policy documents, print, online, and social media, as well as archives related to the constitutional/legal agenda. Methods presentations will primarily review work related to the collection, hosting, cleaning/processing, and analysis (including machine learning and large language models) of textual data as well as linguistic issues concerning the region.  Workshop details We invite scholars to submit their proposals related to data and methods-related presentations with a focus on Central-Eastern Europe. We are particularly interested in  work on the relations between CEE countries and/or the EU, the U.S., China, and Russia  named entity recognition  targeted or aspect-based emotion analysis related to these named entities classification of policy topics   Only submissions explicitly addressing the data collection and/or methodology of the research project will be assessed. We welcome presentations on ongoing projects and work-in-progress, as well as already published work and data repositories.  The workshop is organized by poltextLAB (poltextlab.com) at the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest.  Organising committee: Rebeka Kiss, Ákos Máté, Csaba Molnár, Orsolya Ring, Miklós Sebők. Duration: 1pm, November 23rd (Thursday), – 1pm, November 24th (Friday) Venue: Centre for Social Sciences, 4 Tóth Kálmán utca, Budapest 1097  (Google Maps) Target Audience: Both senior scholars and PhD/postdoctoral level participants  Participation: Accepted participants are expected to do a 10-minute presentation on their data and/or methodological work and serve as chairs/discussants.  The application form is available here:  https://forms.gle/5sciQDGAAKyS1NJy9. The abstract to be submitted should be no longer than 250 words. The submission deadline for proposals is October 6, 2023. Applicants will be notified on an ongoing basis, but no later than October 13, 2023. The registration fee and the workshop dinner for all accepted presenters are kindly sponsored by our partners: HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, MORES (Horizon Europe), V-SHIFT Momentum Research Group (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), the Artificial Intelligence National Laboratory of Hungary, the COMPTEXT Conference (comptextconference.org) and the Visegrád Fund. There are a limited number of travel grants available for one presenting author per paper for economy flights, train or bus rides, and for one night of accommodation. Please indicate on the submission form if you would like to be considered for the travel grant. Please keep in mind that we can offer a limited number of travel grants, and we apply a first come, first served policy for accepted proposals. For more details, please consult the PDF of the call. Please contact Laura Seben for additional information at lauraanna.seben@tk.hu. 

31 July, 2023 – Rebeka Kiss’s presentation at the Conference on Data Science and Law in New York

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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.

18 JUly, 2023 – Rebeka Kiss’s presentation at King’s College London’s Conference

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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.”

5 July, 2023 – Miklós Sebők’s presentation at the OPTED Annual Conference in Vienna

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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/

26 June, 2023 – Rebeka Kiss’s presentation at the Tag der Parlamentsforschung – Day of Parliamentary Research Conference

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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.

28 June, 2023 – Miklós Sebők’s paper presentations at the 15th Annual CAP Conference in Antwerp

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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.

15 June, 2023 – New publication by István Üveges and Orsolya Ring in IEEE Access

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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

15 June, 2023 – New publication by Miklós Sebők, Rebeka Kiss, Ádám Kovács in Parliamentary Affairs

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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

8 June, 2023 – Miklós Sebők receives major new grant to apply artificial intelligence to the study of Central European policy agendas

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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.