Use of graphs for political analysis by Diego Olano and Francisco Rodríguez at Graph-TA 2015

1. Use of graphs for
political analysis
Diego Olano, Francisco Rodríguez

2. The problem
Extracting social networks of politicians and relevant third party actors
based on different media sources (news articles) and parliamentary data
These networks can be used for news summarization and for detecting
patterns of collaboration/opposition between politicians, companies and
NGOs indicative of a lobbying process.
2 approaches
● Co-occurrence based approach
● Topic based approach

3. Co-occurrence
based approach
Searching for articles regarding to
Democratic Representative Garnet Coleman
Found 1200 articles from 4 different new sites
Extract entities and form links based on
sentence based distance metric.
Resulting filtered graph of entities with more
than ten co-occurences with Garnet.

4. Co-occurrence based approach

5. Topic based approach

6. Topic based approach

7. Results
● Ongoing process…
● Demo available at http://www.whoyouelect.com/, shown at Poster session
● Available for the Catalan and Texan parliaments on May 2015

8. Challenges we are facing
● Defining thresholds for the relevance of relationships
● Recognizing and disambiguating entities/coreference resolution over different
languages
● Validating the social networks obtained