News

Rebeka Kiss and Miklós Sebők published a paper entitled Creating an Enhanced Infrastructure of Parliamentary Archives for Better Democratic Transparency and Legislative Research -Report on the OPTED forum in the European Parliament (Brussels, Belgium, 15 June 2022) in the latest issue of  International Journal of Parliamentary Studies. In this paper, they summarise the key findings of the forum “Data4Parliaments” Parliamentary Data for a Better Democracy, organised by the OPTED network at the European Parliament on 15 June 2022. The aim of the conference was to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas related to sharing and analysing parliamentary text data between official archives and different user groups from the social sciences and the civil society.

On the 1st of December 2022, Orsolya Ring and Ákos Máté held a beginners course of the “Text Mining and Artificial Intelligence Training Programme”.  The course introduced the theoretical and practical foundations of text mining and artificial intelligence applications in social sciences.

On Tuesday, 8 and 15 November 2022, Ákos Máté held a course entitled Data Visualization in R. The aim of the course was to provide a practical and interactive overview of data visualization using the ggplot2 package in R. We covered the basic concepts of data visualization and then put them into practice using different data sources. The presentation was in Hungarian, the slides were in English.

We are excited to announce that CompText 2023 will be held at the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. The meeting will be held from May 12-13, 2023 and will include a set of pre-conference training sessions covering multiple approaches to computational social science, text analysis and machine learning. See the CompText website for updates on the meeting and information on prior conferences. The official call for submissions will be announced in early November 2022 with the submission deadline in mid-December.

From 29th to 30th September, OPTED held its second annual meeting in Amsterdam. The city is home to two of our project partners, at the University of Amsterdam and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and provided a great background for fascinating conversations. Members of every Work Package came together to discuss the present and future of the project, both in-person and a hybrid format. The team of Work Package 1 and our local partners in Amsterdam organised a variety of sessions where everyone could hear about the latest work in the project, and give their input for the future direction. We talked about recent and upcoming publications, the ongoing work on the data inventories, as well as plans for the future platform.

István Üveges gave a presentation at the CPSS Workshop in Potsdam, held between 12-15 September 2022. He described a new annotation framework for the emotion analysis of political texts and the machine learning results obtained with the Hungarian BERT model. The event was part of the KONVENS 2022 Conference on the intersection between computational linguistics and political science, where participants discussed issues such as the latest challenges in the sentiment analysis of political texts, propaganda detection using machine learning, or the identification of political groups in social media. The conference proceedings are available on the following link: https://old.gscl.org/en/arbeitskreise/cpss/cpss-2022/workshop-proceedings-2022

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).