Big data and democratic speech: Predicting deliberative quality using machine learning techniques
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores techniques for using supervised machine learning to study discourse quality in large datasets. We explain and illustrate the computational techniques that we have developed to facilitate a large-scale study of deliberative quality in Canada’s three northern territories: Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut. This larger study involves conducting comparative analyses of hundreds of thousands of parliamentary speech acts since the creation of Nunavut 20 years ago. Without computational techniques, we would be unable to conduct such an ambitious and comprehensive analysis of deliberative quality. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the machine learning techniques that we have developed with the hope that they might be used and improved by other communications scholars who are interested in conducting textual analyses using large datasets. Other possible applications of these techniques might include analyses of campaign speeches, party platforms, legislation, judicial rulings, online comments, newspaper articles, and television or radio commentaries.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it