OPaData4all

The Swedish government exposes all parliamentary work through open data and publicly available resources (data.riksdagen.se), which provides a comprehensive and systematized record of the parliament's current and historical work. However, the vast amount of data that constitutes all parliamentary records makes it intractable to access individual records regarding a specific political topic. The research group behind OPaL has, therefore, developed a user-friendly interface for searching, filtering, exporting, and analyzing data from the Swedish parliament, named Riksdagssök (riksdagsdata.oru.se). Based on the previous work on Riksdagssök, the overall goal of this pilot project is two-folded:

1. ...enabling systematic analyses and further studies regarding the development in the political debate over time, such as the debate related to Swedish education.
2. ...improving the functionality behind Riksdagssök, per se.

For this purpose, we will use the state-of-art in machine learning for Natural Language Processing (NLP) in order to develop general language models that not only enable policy analyses regarding how the political debate has evolved over time, but also contributes to the development of computational linguistic methods in policy research more broadly.