Understanding state preferences with text as data: Introducing the UN General Debate corpus

Baturo, Alexander; Dasandi, Niheer; Mikhaylov, Slava

doi:10.1177/2053168017712821

Cited by 124 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Sources of transcript data reported in the included studies are shown in Table 1. Similarly, for speeches not originally in English, Baturo, Dasandi & Mikhaylov (2017) use official translations from the other official languages of the UN (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish). By far the most prominent language is English, analysed in 55 studies.…”

Section: Parliaments and Legislaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sentiment and position-taking analysis of parliamentary debates: a systematic literature review

Abercrombie

Batista-Navarro

2020

J Comput Soc Sc

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Parliamentary and legislative debate transcripts provide access to information concerning the opinions, positions and policy preferences of elected politicians. They attract attention from researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds, from political and social sciences to computer science. As a result, the problem of automatic sentiment and position-taking analysis has been tackled from different perspectives, using varying approaches and methods, and with relatively little collaboration or cross-pollination of ideas. The existing research is scattered across publications from various fields and venues. In this article we present the results of a systematic literature review of 61 studies, all of which address the automatic analysis of the sentiment and opinions expressed and positions taken by speakers in parliamentary (and other legislative) debates. In this review, we discuss the available research with regard to the aims and objectives of the researchers who work on these problems, the automatic analysis tasks they undertake, and the approaches and methods they use.We conclude by summarizing their findings, discussing the challenges of applying computational analysis to parliamentary debates, and suggesting possible avenues for further research.

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Section: Parliaments and Legislaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sentiment and position-taking analysis of parliamentary debates: a systematic literature review

Abercrombie

Batista-Navarro

2020

J Comput Soc Sc

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“…These data are available online at: Harvard Dataverse 1902.1/12379. In addition, we utilize the record of annual speeches delivered by country representatives -often heads of state -during the annual UN General Debate [42]. These speeches are stored as plain text files with associated metadata and are available online at: Harvard Dataverse doi.org/10.7910/DVN/0TJX8Y.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We draw on the newly released UN General Debate Corpus [42] which contains every country statement in the UN General Debate between 1970 and 2017. The General Debate (GD) takes place every September at the start of each new session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA).…”

Section: Supplementary Information the Un General Debate Corpusmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition to being the one major forum where states present their views on international politics free from external constraints, the fact that it takes place annually and includes all UN member states enables comparison over time and across countries. Readers are encouraged to consult Baturo et al [42] for a comprehensive introduction to the corpus.…”

Section: Supplementary Information the Un General Debate Corpusmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Multiplex communities and the emergence of international conflict

2019

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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.

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“…We use a new dataset of GD statements from 1970 to 2016, the UN General Debate Corpus (UNGDC), to examine the international development agenda in the UN [4]. 1 Our application of NLP to these statements focuses in particular on structural topic models (STMs) [5].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What drives the international development agenda? An NLP analysis of the united nations general debate 1970–2016

Baturo

Dasandi

2017

2017 International Conference on the Frontiers and Advances in Data Science (FADS)

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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.

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Understanding state preferences with text as data: Introducing the UN General Debate corpus

Cited by 124 publications

References 22 publications

Sentiment and position-taking analysis of parliamentary debates: a systematic literature review

Sentiment and position-taking analysis of parliamentary debates: a systematic literature review

Multiplex communities and the emergence of international conflict

What drives the international development agenda? An NLP analysis of the united nations general debate 1970–2016

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