How AI Can Help Us Keep Politicians Accountable

DIRK HOVY IS PART OF A RESEARCH PROJECT FUNDED BY SWEDISH RIKSBANKENS JUBILEUMSFOND TO TRACK THE DEVELOPMENT OF ELECTORAL PROMISES ACROSS COMMUNICATION OUTLETS AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Bocconi’s Dirk Hovy, a computational sociolinguist at the Department of Marketing, is part of a research project led by the University of Gothenburg that received a €950,000 grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond to help citizens understand whether politicians keep their electoral promises or not.
 
«The issue here», Prof. Hovy says, «is that, as parties’ communication with voters has become increasingly fragmented and targeted, it is much harder for citizens to keep track of what parties are promising». In order to track campaign promises across a multitude of communication outlets, including social media, the project will integrate existing qualitative methods from political science and develop new research tools based on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) subfields of machine learning and natural language processing. These AI-powered tools will enable researchers to examine, measure, and visualize parties’ developing campaign promises in large amounts of text and speech. The resulting research will be of significant benefit to citizens, who will receive greater clarity on the choices parties are offering.
 
The 36-month research project brings together a panel of established experts from various disciplines. They include researchers specialized in political parties’ promises, social media, qualitative and quantitative methods for analyzing political texts, as well as machine learning and natural language processing. Riksbanken is the Swedish national bank, and the oldest national bank in the world.

by Fabio Todesco