license: cc-by-sa-4.0
language:
- de
- en
- es
- da
- pl
- sv
- nl
metrics:
- accuracy
pipeline_tag: text-classification
tags:
- partypress
- political science
- parties
- press releases
widget:
- text: >-
Labour launches air pollution campaign Labour’s Shadow Minister for the
Natural Environment, will today (Wednesday) launch Labour’s campaign
against air pollution. Maria Eagle will say that 29,000 people die
prematurely in the UK each year because of poor air pollution in our towns
and cities - including more than 3,000 in London. Scientists have warned
that air pollution in Britain’s most polluted cities is stunting the
development of children’s lungs. Maria Eagle MP and Sadiq Khan MP will
announce that the next Labour Government will deliver a national framework
for Low Emission Zones to enable local authorities to encourage cleaner,
greener, less-polluting vehicles to begin to tackle this problem. Unlike
this Tory-led Government the Labour Party will devolve the power, not just
the responsibility, to Local Authorities willing take action against air
pollution.
- text: >-
Dawn Butler MP, Labour’s Shadow
Women and Equalities Secretary, commenting on Equal Pay Day today, said:
“From today onwards women effectively work the rest of the year for free,
which means fifty days of unpaid labour until we hit 2018. “The fact that
the gender pay gap has remained the same for the past three years is a
shocking indictment of the Government’s failure to tackle unequal pay and
the underlying structural issues that allow these disparities to exist.
“Labour is the party of equality. It was Labour that introduced the Equal
Pay Act in 1970 and the next Labour Government will take the necessary
action to end the scourge of unequal pay once and for all.
- text: >-
"Los soldados españoles que están en Afganistán cuentan con las máximas
medidas de seguridad para su protección" Jesús Cuadrado, portavoz
socialista en la Comisión de Defensa del Congreso, ha enviado esta tarde,
en nombre del PSOE, un mensaje de apoyo y solidaridad a los soldados
heridos hoy en Afganistán y a sus familias, así como a sus compañeros en
esta misión internacional. Cuadrado ha resaltado el “enorme sacrificio”
que supone para los soldados una misión de estas características. Un
sacrificio “que está al servicio de todo los españoles”, ha explicado,
“porque contribuyen a la creación de un Estado”, en un lugar que ha sido
usado hasta el momento por los terroristas para cometer atentados en su
país y en resto del mundo. Gracias al trabajo de “nuestros soldados”, ha
añadido, “ahora hay un ejército compuesto por militares afganos y hay una
policía”. Así, “el trabajo de los militares españoles está al servicio de
España y de los demás países”, que participan en esta misión por mandato
de la OTAN, ha recordado. “Es uno de los trabajos más solidarios y
comprometidos que se pueden hacer en el mundo”, ha resaltado el portavoz
socialista. La seguridad de nuestras tropas, una prioridad absoluta “La
seguridad al cien por cien es imposible”, ha admitido Cuadrado. Así lo ha
señalado en numerosas ocasiones tanto el Ministerio de Defensa como el
resto del Gobierno. “Los riesgos que asumimos allí son muy elevados y,
precisamente por eso, durante estos años, el Gobierno ha hecho de la
seguridad de nuestras tropas una prioridad absoluta”. Cuadrado ha
recordado que “todos los blindados que utilizan los militares españoles en
Afganistán han sido renovados”. Los soldados españoles, en concreto,
cuentan con 67 RG31 y 131 blindados tipo Lince. También se ha construido
una nueva base y se ha dotado, a todo el material que utilizan, de las más
modernas medidas de seguridad, así como de unos servicios sanitarios de
alto nivel. “Igualmente, es conocido que se ha ido mejorando el sistema de
transporte de nuestras tropas con las mejores medidas de seguridad”,
concluyó el portavoz en la Comisión de Defensa.
- text: >-
Nederland kan uit de crisis komen als we banen en structureel herstel
voorop stellen. Dat zei Sybrand Buma vandaag in zijn speech op het
partijcongres van het CDA in Leeuwarden. Dat was volgens hem de aanpak van
Ruud Lubbers in de crisis van de jaren 80, en het was de aanpak van Jan
Peter Balkenende aan het begin van deze eeuw. Beide CDA’ers waren er van
overtuigd dat werk en economisch herstel niet worden gecreëerd door de
overheid. Maar de overheid kan wel de omstandigheden scheppen waaronder de
economie weer tot leven komt. Die visie van Lubbers en Balkenende is ook
de visie van Buma en ligt ten grondslag aan het alternatief dat hij begin
september presenteerde. Buma benadrukte ook dat het CDA zowel het kabinet
als D66, CU en SGP zal blijven aansporen om de chronisch zieken en
gehandicapten meer tegemoet te komen. Het herfstakkoord is in strijd met
alles waar het CDA vanaf de jaren ’80, tot en met het Strategisch Beraad,
voor staat. Het CDA wil een bloeiende samenleving met een eerlijke
economie en een dienende overheid als schild voor de zwakken. Buma stond
er ook nog even bij stil dat Leeuwarden voor hem een bijzondere plek is,
om twee redenen. Hij is er geboren, en het is de plaats van waaruit de
Elfstedentocht begint. Buma heeft zelf de Elfstedentocht gereden, bijna 30
jaar geleden, en is nog steeds rijdend lid van de vereniging. Tijdens zijn
speech maakte hij bekend dat hij zijn startbewijs inleverde om ruimte te
maken voor een jongere, mocht de tocht binnenkort weer gereden worden.Klik
op de link op onderaan deze pagina om de hele speech te lezen.
PARTYPRESS multilingual
Fine-tuned model in seven languages on texts from nine countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, UK), based on bert-base-multilingual-cased. Used in Erfort et al. (2023), building on the PARTYPRESS database. For the downstream task of classyfing press releases from political parties into 23 unique policy areas we achieve a performance comparable to expert human coders.
Model description
The PARTYPRESS multilingual model builds on bert-base-multilingual-cased but has a supervised component. This means, it was fine-tuned using texts labeled by humans. The labels indicate 23 different political issue categories derived from the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP):
| Code | Issue |
|---|---|
| 1 | Macroeconomics |
| 2 | Civil Rights |
| 3 | Health |
| 4 | Agriculture |
| 5 | Labor |
| 6 | Education |
| 7 | Environment |
| 8 | Energy |
| 9 | Immigration |
| 10 | Transportation |
| 12 | Law and Crime |
| 13 | Social Welfare |
| 14 | Housing |
| 15 | Domestic Commerce |
| 16 | Defense |
| 17 | Technology |
| 18 | Foreign Trade |
| 19.1 | International Affairs |
| 19.2 | European Union |
| 20 | Government Operations |
| 23 | Culture |
| 98 | Non-thematic |
| 99 | Other |
Model variations
We also provide monolingual models for each of the nine countries covered by the PARTYPRESS database. The model can be easily extended to other languages, country contexts, or time periods by fine-tuning it with minimal additional labeled texts.
Intended uses & limitations
The main use of the model is for text classification of press releases from political parties. It may also be useful for other political texts.
The classification can then be used to measure which issues parties are discussing in their communication.
How to use
This model can be used directly with a pipeline for text classification:
>>> from transformers import pipeline
>>> tokenizer_kwargs = {'padding':True,'truncation':True,'max_length':512}
>>> partypress = pipeline("text-classification", model = "cornelius/partypress-multilingual", tokenizer = "cornelius/partypress-multilingual", **tokenizer_kwargs)
>>> partypress(["We urgently need to fight climate change and reduce carbon emissions. This is what our party stands for.",
"We urge all parties to end the violence and come to the table. This conflict between the two countries must end.",
"Así, “el trabajo de los militares españoles está al servicio de España y de los demás países”, que participan en esta misión por mandato de la OTAN, ha recordado.",
"Dass es immer noch einen Gender-Pay-Gap gibt, geht auf das Konto dieser Regierung."])
[{'label': '7 - Environment', 'score': 0.9664431810379028},
{'label': '19.1 - International Affairs', 'score': 0.9851641654968262},
{'label': '16 - Defense', 'score': 0.986809492111206},
{'label': '2 - Civil Rights', 'score': 0.9799079895019531}]
Limitations and bias
The model was trained with data from parties in nine countries. For use in other countries, the model may be further fine-tuned. Without further fine-tuning, the performance of the model may be lower.
The model may have biased predictions. We discuss some biases by country, party, and over time in the release paper for the PARTYPRESS database. For example, the performance is highest for press releases from Ireland (75%) and lowest for Poland (55%).
Training data
The PARTYPRESS multilingual model was fine-tuned with 27,243 press releases in seven languages on texts from 68 European parties in nine countries. The press releases were labeled by two expert human coders per country.
For the training data of the underlying model, please refer to bert-base-multilingual-cased
Training procedure
Preprocessing
For the preprocessing, please refer to bert-base-multilingual-cased
Pretraining
For the pretraining, please refer to bert-base-multilingual-cased
Fine-tuning
We fine-tuned the model using 27,243 labeled press releases from political parties in seven languages.
Training Hyperparameters
The batch size for training was 12, for testing 2, with four epochs. All other hyperparameters were the standard from the transformers library.
Framework versions
- Transformers 4.28.0
- TensorFlow 2.12.0
- Datasets 2.12.0
- Tokenizers 0.13.3
Evaluation results
Fine-tuned on our downstream task, this model achieves the following results in a five-fold cross validation that are comparable to the performance of our expert human coders:
| Accuracy | Precision | Recall | F1 score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 69.52 | 67.99 | 67.60 | 66.77 |
Note that the classification task is difficult because topics such as environment and energy are often difficult to keep apart.
When we aggregate the shares of text for each issue, we find that the root-mean-square error is very low (0.29).
BibTeX entry and citation info
@article{erfort_partypress_2023,
author = {Cornelius Erfort and
Lukas F. Stoetzer and
Heike Klüver},
title = {The PARTYPRESS Database: A new comparative database of parties’ press releases},
journal = {Research and Politics},
volume = {10},
number = {3},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1177/20531680231183512},
URL = {https://doi.org/10.1177/20531680231183512}
}
Erfort, C., Stoetzer, L. F., & Klüver, H. (2023). The PARTYPRESS Database: A new comparative database of parties’ press releases. Research & Politics, 10(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/20531680231183512
Further resources
Github: cornelius-erfort/partypress
Research and Politics Dataverse: Replication Data for: The PARTYPRESS Database: A New Comparative Database of Parties’ Press Releases
Acknowledgements
Research for this contribution is part of the Cluster of Excellence "Contestations of the Liberal Script" (EXC 2055, Project-ID: 390715649), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy. Cornelius Erfort is moreover grateful for generous funding provided by the DFG through the Research Training Group DYNAMICS (GRK 2458/1).
Contact
Cornelius Erfort
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin