Psst: a web-based system for tracking political statements

ABSTRACT

Determining candidates' views on important issues is critical in deciding whom to support and vote for; but finding their statements and votes on an issue can be laborious. In this paper we present PSST, (Political Statement and Support Tracker), a search engine to facilitate analysis of political statements and votes over time. We show that prior tools for text analysis can be combined with minimal manual processing to provide a first step in the full automation of this process.

REFERENCES

• 1: Extractor. www.extractorlive.com.
• 2: D. P. Kuhn. Bush's top ten flip-flops: Cbsnews.com charts the opinion switches, part 1: George bush. www.cbsnews.com, September 2004.
• 3: D. P. Kuhn. Kerry's top ten flip-flops: Cbsnews.com charts the opinion switches, part 2: John kerry. www.cbsnews.com, September 2004.
• 4: M. Sandalow. News analysis: Flip-flopping charge unsupported by facts. www.sfgate.com, September 2004.
• 5: Peter D. Turney, Learning Algorithms for Keyphrase Extraction, Information Retrieval, v.2 n.4, p.303-336, May 2000 [doi>10.1023/A:1009976227802]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Search process

Additional Classification:
  J. Computer Applications
  J.4 SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

General Terms:
Algorithms

Keywords:
elections, politics, search