Slava Mikhaylov

Kakia Chatsiou, Slava Jankin Mikhaylov

Political science, and social science in general, have traditionally been using computational methods to study areas such as voting behavior, policy making, international conflict, and international development. More recently, increasingly available quantities of data are being combined with improved algorithms and affordable computational resources to predict, learn, and discover new insights from data that is large in volume and variety. New developments in the areas of machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), and, more generally, artificial intelligence (AI) are opening up new opportunities for testing theories and evaluating the impact of interventions and programs in a more dynamic and effective way. Applications using large volumes of structured and unstructured data are becoming common in government and industry, and increasingly also in social science research. This chapter offers an introduction to such methods drawing examples from political science. Focusing on the areas where the strengths of the methods coincide with challenges in these fields, the chapter first presents an introduction to AI and its core technology - machine learning, with its rapidly developing subfield of deep learning. The discussion of deep neural networks is illustrated with the NLP tasks that are relevant to political science. The latest advances in deep learning methods for NLP are also reviewed, together with their potential for improving information extraction and pattern recognition from political science texts.

Slava Jankin Mikhaylov, Marc Esteve, Averill Campion

Public sector organisations are increasingly interested in using data science and artificial intelligence capabilities to deliver policy and generate efficiencies in high uncertainty environments. The long-term success of data science and AI in the public sector relies on effectively embedding it into delivery solutions for policy implementation. However, governments cannot do this integration of AI into public service delivery on their own. The UK Government Industrial Strategy is clear that delivering on the AI grand challenge requires collaboration between universities and public and private sectors. This cross-sectoral collaborative approach is the norm in applied AI centres of excellence around the world. Despite their popularity, cross-sector collaborations entail serious management challenges that hinder their success. In this article we discuss the opportunities and challenges from AI for public sector. Finally, we propose a series of strategies to successfully manage these cross-sectoral collaborations.

Alexander Herzog, Peter John, Slava Jankin Mikhaylov

Topic models are widely used in natural language processing, allowing researchers to estimate the underlying themes in a collection of documents. Most topic models use unsupervised methods and hence require the additional step of attaching meaningful labels to estimated topics. This process of manual labeling is not scalable and suffers from human bias. We present a semi-automatic transfer topic labeling method that seeks to remedy these problems. Domain-specific codebooks form the knowledge-base for automated topic labeling. We demonstrate our approach with a dynamic topic model analysis of the complete corpus of UK House of Commons speeches 1935-2014, using the coding instructions of the Comparative Agendas Project to label topics. We show that our method works well for a majority of the topics we estimate; but we also find that institution-specific topics, in particular on subnational governance, require manual input. We validate our results using human expert coding.

Caleb Pomeroy, Niheer Dasandi, Slava Jankin Mikhaylov

Advances in community detection reveal new insights into multiplex and multilayer networks. Less work, however, investigates the relationship between these communities and outcomes in social systems. We leverage these advances to shed light on the relationship between the cooperative mesostructure of the international system and the onset of interstate conflict. We detect communities based upon weaker signals of affinity expressed in United Nations votes and speeches, as well as stronger signals observed across multiple layers of bilateral cooperation. Communities of diplomatic affinity display an expected negative relationship with conflict onset. Ties in communities based upon observed cooperation, however, display no effect under a standard model specification and a positive relationship with conflict under an alternative specification. These results align with some extant hypotheses but also point to a paucity in our understanding of the relationship between community structure and behavioral outcomes in networks.

Caleb Pomeroy, Niheer Dasandi, Slava J. Mikhaylov

This paper contributes to an emerging literature that models votes and text in tandem to better understand polarization of expressed preferences. It introduces a new approach to estimate preference polarization in multidimensional settings, such as international relations, based on developments in the natural language processing and network science literatures -- namely word embeddings, which retain valuable syntactical qualities of human language, and community detection in multilayer networks, which locates densely connected actors across multiple, complex networks. We find that the employment of these tools in tandem helps to better estimate states' foreign policy preferences expressed in UN votes and speeches beyond that permitted by votes alone. The utility of these located affinity blocs is demonstrated through an application to conflict onset in International Relations, though these tools will be of interest to all scholars faced with the measurement of preferences and polarization in multidimensional settings.

Radoslaw Kowalski, Marc Esteve, Slava J. Mikhaylov

Research on customer satisfaction has increased substantially in recent years. However, the relative importance and relationships between different determinants of satisfaction remains uncertain. Moreover, quantitative studies to date tend to test for significance of pre-determined factors thought to have an influence with no scalable means to identify other causes of user satisfaction. The gaps in knowledge make it difficult to use available knowledge on user preference for public service improvement. Meanwhile, digital technology development has enabled new methods to collect user feedback, for example through online forums where users can comment freely on their experience. New tools are needed to analyze large volumes of such feedback. Use of topic models is proposed as a feasible solution to aggregate open-ended user opinions that can be easily deployed in the public sector. Generated insights can contribute to a more inclusive decision-making process in public service provision. This novel methodological approach is applied to a case of service reviews of publicly-funded primary care practices in England. Findings from the analysis of 145,000 reviews covering almost 7,700 primary care centers indicate that the quality of interactions with staff and bureaucratic exigencies are the key issues driving user satisfaction across England.

Anastasia Ushakova, Slava J. Mikhaylov

Big spatio-temporal datasets, available through both open and administrative data sources, offer significant potential for social science research. The magnitude of the data allows for increased resolution and analysis at individual level. While there are recent advances in forecasting techniques for highly granular temporal data, little attention is given to segmenting the time series and finding homogeneous patterns. In this paper, it is proposed to estimate behavioral profiles of individuals' activities over time using Gaussian Process-based models. In particular, the aim is to investigate how individuals or groups may be clustered according to the model parameters. Such a Bayesian non-parametric method is then tested by looking at the predictability of the segments using a combination of models to fit different parts of the temporal profiles. Model validity is then tested on a set of holdout data. The dataset consists of half hourly energy consumption records from smart meters from more than 100,000 households in the UK and covers the period from 2015 to 2016. The methodological approach developed in the paper may be easily applied to datasets of similar structure and granularity, for example social media data, and may lead to improved accuracy in the prediction of social dynamics and behavior.

Philipp Broniecki, Anna Hanchar, Slava J. Mikhaylov

Availability, collection and access to quantitative data, as well as its limitations, often make qualitative data the resource upon which development programs heavily rely. Both traditional interview data and social media analysis can provide rich contextual information and are essential for research, appraisal, monitoring and evaluation. These data may be difficult to process and analyze both systematically and at scale. This, in turn, limits the ability of timely data driven decision-making which is essential in fast evolving complex social systems. In this paper, we discuss the potential of using natural language processing to systematize analysis of qualitative data, and to inform quick decision-making in the development context. We illustrate this with interview data generated in a format of micro-narratives for the UNDP Fragments of Impact project.

Alexander Baturo, Niheer Dasandi, Slava J. Mikhaylov

There is surprisingly little known about agenda setting for international development in the United Nations (UN) despite it having a significant influence on the process and outcomes of development efforts. This paper addresses this shortcoming using a novel approach that applies natural language processing techniques to countries' annual statements in the UN General Debate. Every year UN member states deliver statements during the General Debate on their governments' perspective on major issues in world politics. These speeches provide invaluable information on state preferences on a wide range of issues, including international development, but have largely been overlooked in the study of global politics. This paper identifies the main international development topics that states raise in these speeches between 1970 and 2016, and examine the country-specific drivers of international development rhetoric.

Alexander Herzog, Slava J. Mikhaylov

We present a database of parliamentary debates that contains the complete record of parliamentary speeches from Dáil Éireann, the lower house and principal chamber of the Irish parliament, from 1919 to 2013. In addition, the database contains background information on all TDs (Teachta Dála, members of parliament), such as their party affiliations, constituencies and office positions. The current version of the database includes close to 4.5 million speeches from 1,178 TDs. The speeches were downloaded from the official parliament website and further processed and parsed with a Python script. Background information on TDs was collected from the member database of the parliament website. Data on cabinet positions (ministers and junior ministers) was collected from the official website of the government. A record linkage algorithm and human coders were used to match TDs and ministers.

Stefano Gurciullo, Slava Mikhaylov

In complex, high dimensional and unstructured data it is often difficult to extract meaningful patterns. This is especially the case when dealing with textual data. Recent studies in machine learning, information theory and network science have developed several novel instruments to extract the semantics of unstructured data, and harness it to build a network of relations. Such approaches serve as an efficient tool for dimensionality reduction and pattern detection. This paper applies semantic network science to extract ideological proximity in the international arena, by focusing on the data from General Debates in the UN General Assembly on the topics of high salience to international community. UN General Debate corpus (UNGDC) covers all high-level debates in the UN General Assembly from 1970 to 2014, covering all UN member states. The research proceeds in three main steps. First, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is used to extract the topics of the UN speeches, and therefore semantic information. Each country is then assigned a vector specifying the exposure to each of the topics identified. This intermediate output is then used in to construct a network of countries based on information theoretical metrics where the links capture similar vectorial patterns in the topic distributions. Topology of the networks is then analyzed through network properties like density, path length and clustering. Finally, we identify specific topological features of our networks using the map equation framework to detect communities in our networks of countries.

Stefano Gurciullo, Slava Mikhaylov

Foreign policy analysis has been struggling to find ways to measure policy preferences and paradigm shifts in international political systems. This paper presents a novel, potential solution to this challenge, through the application of a neural word embedding (Word2vec) model on a dataset featuring speeches by heads of state or government in the United Nations General Debate. The paper provides three key contributions based on the output of the Word2vec model. First, it presents a set of policy attention indices, synthesizing the semantic proximity of political speeches to specific policy themes. Second, it introduces country-specific semantic centrality indices, based on topological analyses of countries' semantic positions with respect to each other. Third, it tests the hypothesis that there exists a statistical relation between the semantic content of political speeches and UN voting behavior, falsifying it and suggesting that political speeches contain information of different nature then the one behind voting outcomes. The paper concludes with a discussion of the practical use of its results and consequences for foreign policy analysis, public accountability, and transparency.

Stefano Gurciullo, Michael Smallegan, María Pereda et al.

This study is a first, exploratory attempt to use quantitative semantics techniques and topological analysis to analyze systemic patterns arising in a complex political system. In particular, we use a rich data set covering all speeches and debates in the UK House of Commons between 1975 and 2014. By the use of dynamic topic modeling (DTM) and topological data analysis (TDA) we show that both members and parties feature specific roles within the system, consistent over time, and extract global patterns indicating levels of political cohesion. Our results provide a wide array of novel hypotheses about the complex dynamics of political systems, with valuable policy applications.