News

On September 26, Miklós Sebők received the grant award of the new Lendület (“Momentum”) research group at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 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 (“Momentum”) research group was 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. Details on the Momentum research project of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences can be found here (in Hungarian): https://mta.hu/mta_hirei/a-bronzkortol-a-nanotechnologiaig-19-uj-lendulet-kutatocsoport-alakul-az-mta-tamogatasaval-112990.

We are happy to announce that we are organizing a workshop on 23-24 November 2023 at the Centre for Social Sciences, in Budapest. The workshop’s aim is to bring together scholars and hold data and method-related presentations with a focus on the legislature and the mainstream print/online media in Central and Eastern Europe. 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 September 30, 2023, 4 pm CET. Applicants will be notified on an ongoing basis, but no later than by October 6, 2023. You can find more details here.

On September 6, Ákos Máté presented the paper “Introducing the CAP BABEL MACHINE: A state-of-the-art AI solution for automated coding of policy agendas” at the 2023 General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) hosted by Charles University, Prague. Ákos Máté’s paper presentation took place in the Machine Learning and AI in Political Science panel, in the Advancements and Innovations in Research Design and Methods: New Conditions or New Challenges? section. The abstract of the paper is available here: https://ecpr.eu/Events/Event/PaperDetails/69814 The ECPR General Conference program is available here: https://ecpr.eu/Events/AcademicProgramme/Programme?EventID=214 If you are interested in the CAP Babel Machine, you can find it here: https://babel.poltextlab.com/

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