Gavin Abercrombie
Debate transcripts from the UK House of Commons provide access to a wealth of information concerning the opinions and attitudes of politicians and their parties towards arguably the most important topics facing societies and their citizens, as well as potential insights into the democratic processes that take place within Parliament.
In my PhD project, I apply natural language processing and machine learning methods to debate speeches with the aim of determining the attitudes and positions expressed by speakers towards the topics they discuss.
In this talk, I will present research on speech-level sentiment analysis and opinion-topic/policy detection in debate motions, as well as ongoing work on compiling a comprehensive review of research from both computer science and social science in this area. I will also discuss the challenges presented and multidisciplinary approaches to the problem, and present ideas for the direction of future investigation.