Automated interpretation of political and economic policy documents: Machine learning using semantic and syntactic information

The basic idea of the project is to develop a general understanding of how state agencies' policy announcements are interpreted by taking streams of policy announcements and interpretations, annotating (coding) the interpretations by hand, then using machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to develop a model which generates annotations from announcements. Specifically, we will use streams of two different types of policy announcements, each for two countries (three in total), one on foreign policy related issues and the other on central bank monetary policy; we will also use streams of one particular type of interpretation, namely journalistic accounts in ideologically different newspapers; and we will annotate the journalistic accounts in terms of attributed motives, conditional predictions, and other ways in which interpreters typically gloss policy announcements. We will then use ML techniques to develop and train deep learning models of textual entailment and inference which use syntactic and semantic (both in general and for specific domains) information in the announcement texts to map from announcements to annotations.
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies
Idiap Research Institute
Swiss National Science Foundation
Jan 01, 2019
Mar 31, 2024