Committee-Based Profiles for Politician Finding

Abstract

One step towards breaking down barriers between citizens and politicians is to help people identify those politicians who share their concerns. This paper is set in the field of expert finding and is based on the automatic construction of politicians’ profiles from their speeches on parliamentary committees. These committee-based profiles are treated as documents and are indexed by an information retrieval system. Given a query representing a citizen’s concern, a profile ranking is then obtained. In the final step, the different results for each candidate are combined in order to obtain the final politician ranking. We explore the use of classic combination strategies for this purpose and present a new approach that improves state-of-the-art performance and which is more stable under different conditions. We also introduce a two-stage model where the identification of a broader concept (such as the committee) is used to improve the final politician ranking.