Title Predicting party group from the Lithuanian parliamentary speeches
Another Title Partijos prognozavimas pagal parlamentarų politinius pasisakymus.
Authors Kapočiūtė-Dzikienė, Jurgita ; Krupavičius, Algis
DOI 10.5755/j01.itc.43.3.5871
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Is Part of Informacinės technologijos ir valdymas = Information technology and control.. Kaunas : KTU. 2014, t. 43, Nr. 3, p. 321-332.. ISSN 1392-124X. eISSN 2335-884X
Keywords [eng] computational linguistics ; supervised machine learning ; text classification into party groups
Abstract [eng] A number of recent research works have used supervised machine learning approaches with a bag-of-words to classify political texts –in particular, speeches and debates– by their ideological position, expressed with a party membership. However, our classification task is more complex due to the several reasons. First, we deal with the Lithuanian language which is highly inflective, has rich morphology, vocabulary, word derivation system, and relatively free-word-order in a sentence. Besides, we have more classes, as the Lithuanian Parliament consists of more party groups if compared to e.g. the European Parliament or the US Senate. Moreover, classes are not stable, because a considerable number of the Lithuanian parliamentarians migrate from one party group to another even within the same parliamentary term. In this research we experimentally investigated the influence of different pre-processing techniques and feature types on two datasets composed of the texts taken from two parliamentary terms. A classifier based on the bag-of-words and token bigrams interpolation gave the best results: i.e. it outperformed random and majority baselines by more than 0.13 points and achieved 0.54 and 0.49 accuracy on the 1st and the 2nd dataset, respectively. The error analysis revealed that the same confusion patterns stand for both datasets, besides, majority of these confusions can be explained on the basis of the ideological or pragmatic similarities between those party groups.
Published Kaunas : KTU
Type Journal article
Language English
Publication date 2014
CC license CC license description