Abstract

Policy networks are widely used by political scientists and economists to explain various financial and social phenomena, such as the development of partnerships between political entities or institutions from different levels of governance. The analysis of policy networks demands a series of arduous and time-consuming manual steps including interviews and questionnaires. In this paper, we estimate the strength of relations between actors in policy networks using features extracted from data harvested from the web. Features include webpage counts, outlinks, and lexical information extracted from web documents or web snippets. The proposed approach is automatic and does not require any external knowledge source, other than the specification of the word forms that correspond to the political actors. The features are evaluated both in isolation and jointly for both positive and negative (antagonistic) actor …

Date

2012

Authors

Theodosis Moschopoulos, Elias Iosif, Leeda Demetropoulou, Alexandros Potamianos, Shrikanth Shri Narayanan

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering

Volume

25

Issue

10

Pages

2404-2417

Publisher

IEEE