DHB: The Dynamics of Political Representation and Political Rhetoric

民主立法机构[或“议会”、“代议制议会”、“理事会”等]的逐字记录代表了一个未开发的信息来源，对于研究民主社会和多个时间尺度上的语言具有独特的重要性。对于语言学家来说，我们没有其他地方有系统的、分分钟的口语记录，这些记录是由一群缓慢变化和重叠的人在很长一段时间内交换的。对于政治学家来说，这些也是选出的政治代表对当今问题进行审议的独特来源。因此，立法记录为研究从几分钟到几个世纪的时间尺度上的语言和修辞、民主政治和代表制及其相互作用的动态提供了难得的机会。然而，一个立法机构的记录在一天内可以达到数千页。任何一个人都不可能一口气读完立法机关的全部记录，更不用说吸收或分析了。然而，越来越多地以电子形式提供这些记录，为各种形式的计算机化分析提供了可能性。这个多学科项目应用并推进了计算机科学、信息科学和统计学的最新发展——特别是自然语言处理和从大规模数据库中进行统计学习——来分析世界各地民主国家的立法记录，阐明了政治代表和政治修辞的动态的重要问题。在该项目的第一阶段，将根据立法记录编制新的语料库（语言数据库）。使用包括缩放、分类和总结在内的数据缩减技术，将开发和改进用于议会语言和议会发言人动态分析的新颖统计和计算方法。在这个项目的第二阶段，这些数据和技术将更广泛地应用于语言学、政治学和社会科学的重要问题。在所有情况下，将在多个时间尺度上以多种语言审查广泛的民主立法机构（从地方到国际）。这些重要问题的例子包括：立法演讲能告诉我们政党在民主制度中的作用吗？他们什么时候竞争，什么时候合作，什么时候两极化，在什么问题上？关于民主代表制，立法讲话能告诉我们什么？如何及何时将新议题纳入立法机关的议程？代表何时领导，领导谁；他们什么时候跟随谁？立法演讲能告诉我们关于个别民主代表的什么？他们会根据公民的喜好、职业动机改变自己的修辞行为，还是根本不改变？性别或群体认同会影响修辞选择吗？关于语言本身，立法演讲能教给我们什么？在过去的两个世纪里，语言的政治内容发生了怎样的变化？立法辩论真的涉及信息交流或说服吗？事件和政治言论是如何相互作用的？什么时候事件会导致政治言论的转变？什么时候谈论政策或其他政治变化会转化为实际的变化？它是可预测的吗？这一多学科国际项目的更广泛影响包括：以研究政治和语言的新软件和数据的形式加强科学基础设施，加强监测民主体制的庞大记录的公共基础设施，以及分析一般应用的大规模文本数据库的新的统计和计算技术。这项研究将最终导致提高理解和预测世界各地的政治和政策变化的能力，以及对语言如何影响政治，政治如何影响语言，以及它们之间的相互作用如何影响民主的更好理解。

The verbatim records of democratic legislatures [or "parliaments", "representative assemblies", "councils", etc.] represent a source of untapped information of unique importance for the study of both democratic societies and language over multiple time scales. For linguists, there is no other place where we have a systematic minute-by-minute record of the spoken word exchanged by a slowly changing and overlapping set of individuals over significant lengths of time. For political scientists, these are also unique sources of deliberations by elected political representatives about the issues of the day. As such, legislative records provide exceptional opportunities for studying the dynamics of language and rhetoric, of democratic politics and representation, and of their interactions, over time scales ranging from minutes to centuries. The record of a single legislature can, however, run to thousands of pages in a single day. It is impossible for any one person to read, much less absorb or analyze, the entire record of a legislature as quickly as it is produced. Increasing availability of these records in electronic form, however, opens possibilities for various forms of computerized analysis. This multidisciplinary project applies and advances recent developments in computer science, information science, and statistics - for natural language processing in particular and statistical learning from massive databases in general - to the analysis of legislative records from democracies worldwide, illuminating important questions of dynamics of political representation and political rhetoric.In the first stage of the project, new corpora (linguistic databases) will be developed from legislative records. Using data reduction techniques including scaling, classification, and summarization, novel statistical and computational methodologies for the dynamic analysis of parliamentary language and parliamentary speakers will be developed and refined.In the second stage of this project, these data and techniques will be applied to questions of importance to linguistics, political science, and social science more generally. In all cases, a wide range of democratic legislatures (from subnational to international), in a wide range of languages, over multiple time scales will be examined. Examples of these important questions include:What can legislative speech tell us about the role of political parties in a democracy? When do they compete, when do they cooperate, when do they polarize, and on what issues?What can legislative speech tell us about democratic representation? How and when are new issues incorporated into the agenda of a legislature? When and whom do representatives lead; when and whom do they follow?What can legislative speech tell us about individual democratic representatives? Do they change their rhetorical behavior in response to citizen preferences, to career motivations, or not at all? Does gender or group identity affect rhetorical choices?What can legislative speech teach us about language itself? How has the political content of language changed over the last two centuries? Do legislative debates actually involve exchanges of information or persuasion?How do events and political rhetoric interact? When do events cause a shift in political rhetoric? When does talk about policy or other political change translate into actual change? Is it predictable?The broader impacts of this multidisciplinary international project include enhanced scientific infrastructure in the form of new software and data for the study of politics and language, enhanced public infrastructure for monitoring what are now impossibly large records of democratic institutions, and new statistical and computational techniques for analyzing large-scale textual databases in general applications. This research will ultimately lead to an increased ability to understand and forecast political and policy changes around the world as well as a greater understanding of how language affects politics, how politics affects language, and how the interaction between them affects democracy.