About The Series

The CIVICA Data Science Seminar series is a unique multi-disciplinary series focused on applications and methodologies of data science for the social, political, and economic world.

Session 4 Spring 2024 Details: Abstract from the speaker

Populist rhetoric is increasingly prevalent worldwide and affects all countries. Although populism has been identified as a heterogeneous political phenomenon and a multidimensional construct, its detection in the text often remains abstract, limiting the detailed view of populist rhetorical patterns. People-centrism and anti-elitism are often named as one of the core features of populism. To better analyze these dimensions, especially anti-elitism, we extend the idea of Opinion Role Labeling (ORL) to explore negative and positive stances towards the elite and the people. In this talk, I will showcase how natural language processing methods can be utilized to automatically analyze populist rhetoric in texts. Specifically, we will discuss how ORL can be used to identify negative attitudes toward specific groups by detecting group mentions and related stances. We will also delve into the importance of tailoring these models to a certain domain (e.g., parliamentary debates). As a preview of my current research, I will also present how large language models can be applied in this context.

Seminar Speaker

Agenda