| Prof. Dragomir Radev is co-author on a paper that won the Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology. The annual Gosnell Prize is given by the Society for Political Methodology for the best work in political methodology presented at a political science conference in the previous year. The paper, An Automated Method of Topic-Coding Legislative Speech Over Time with Application to the 105th-108th U.S. Senate, by Kevin M. Quinn, Burt L. Monroe, Michael Colaresi, Michael H. Crespin, and Dragomir R. Radev, was presented at the 2006 Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) Meeting. Radev stated, "Our work is based on an NSF grant from the Human and Social Dynamics program. We are trying to apply techniques from natural language processing (NLP) to political discourse modeling and understand how politicians use subtle changes in the way they use certain words to promote their agendas. We have been studying the legislative proceedings of several major English-speaking countries such as the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. My role in this project is on the CS/NLP side as my co-authors are all political scientists." Radev stressed that this prize shows how computer and information science research, particularly Natural Language Processing/Information Retrieval (NLP/IR), can be of help to other sciences, including in this case political science, but also bioinformatics and the humanities. |
