Ana Paula Couto da Silva

Flávio Soriano, Victoria F. Mello, Pedro B. Rigueira et al.

Analyses of legislative behavior often rely on voting records, overlooking the rich semantic and rhetorical content of political speech. In this paper, we ask three complementary questions about parliamentary discourse: how things are said, what is being said, and who is speaking in discursively similar ways. To answer these questions, we introduce a scalable and generalizable computational framework that combines diachronic stylometric analysis, contextual topic modeling, and semantic clustering of deputies' speeches. We apply this framework to a large-scale case study of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, using a corpus of over 450,000 speeches from 2003 to 2025. Our results show a long-term stylistic shift toward shorter and more direct speeches, a legislative agenda that reorients sharply in response to national crises, and a granular map of discursive alignments in which regional and gender identities often prove more salient than formal party affiliation. More broadly, this work offers a robust methodology for analyzing parliamentary discourse as a multidimensional phenomenon that complements traditional vote-based approaches.

Bárbara Silveira, Henrique S. Silva, Fabricio Murai et al.

In recent years, Online Social Networks have become an important medium for people who suffer from mental disorders to share moments of hardship, and receive emotional and informational support. In this work, we analyze how discussions in Reddit communities related to mental disorders can help improve the health conditions of their users. Using the emotional tone of users' writing as a proxy for emotional state, we uncover relationships between user interactions and state changes. First, we observe that authors of negative posts often write rosier comments after engaging in discussions, indicating that users' emotional state can improve due to social support. Second, we build models based on SOTA text embedding techniques and RNNs to predict shifts in emotional tone. This differs from most of related work, which focuses primarily on detecting mental disorders from user activity. We demonstrate the feasibility of accurately predicting the users' reactions to the interactions experienced in these platforms, and present some examples which illustrate that the models are correctly capturing the effects of comments on the author's emotional tone. Our models hold promising implications for interventions to provide support for people struggling with mental illnesses.