Document Type

Conference Paper

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

Publication Details

Proceedings of 21st Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS 2010)

NUI Galway, 30 August - 1st September, 2010.

Abstract

The availability of the full text of Irish parliamentary questions offers opportunities for using machine learning techniques to examine the currently much discussed role of elected representatives (TDs) in the Irish parliamentary system. Bluntly, are TDs mainly national legislators or “constituency messenger boys”? This paper presents an initial investigation into the use of automated text classification techniques to categorise parliamentary questions from 1922 up to 2008 as national or local. The approach uses a bag of words representation, standard feature reduction methods and an SVM classifier. Initial results show there is very little evidence in the corpus of parliamentary questions in Dail Eireann to support the view that the role of the TD is determined by mainly clientelist/parochial imperatives.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/D7MG78

Download


Share

COinS