The layers of political public sphere in Hungary (2001–2020)

A sociological analysis of the official, media-based and lay online public sphere using automated text analytics and critical discourse analysis

A research project supported by NKFIH (National Research, Development and Innovation Office) (K-134428)

Period of support: December 2020-December 2023

Date of the report: 20. December 2023.

Principal Investigator: Renáta Németh

Participants: Ildikó Barna, Jakab Buda, Eszter Katona, Árpád Knap, Tibor Pólya (HUN-REN TTK), Márton Rakovics, Zsófia Rakovics, Domonkos Sik, Emese Tóth, Anna Unger

 

Summary

The public sphere is the cornerstone of modern representative democracies: it is responsible not only for providing the voters with the necessary information for a deliberate vote but also to keep the administrative system in check not solely from a legal but also from a moral standpoint. In this sense, the prospect of averting those potential distortions and crises which may emerge in democratic systems depend on the quality of the public sphere (Habermas 1975, 1998). The emergence of the online public sphere overlaps with several waves of significant political transformations and reconfigurations of the political field in Hungary. Therefore, Hungary is a particularly rich context for this research.

The research provided a sociological analysis of the public discourse of the last two decades at different levels of the Hungarian public sphere – the official political sphere, the online media and the online lay public – focusing on a few key aspects, mainly based on the automated analysis of large text corpora. We have explored the linguistic representation of political polarization, the discourse of memory politics, collective identity issues and certain public policy topics.

Digital data produced in online public spheres are primarily textual. Such data require analytical tools, which became accessible only recently with the emergence of the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) capable of processing large-scale textual data in a systematic, automated way. These innovative tools provide suitable depth in results for sociology (Németh and Koltai, 2020). Sociology will exploit the potential of these changes if it can renew its research culture while preserving its critical reflections. Hence it was our mission to plan a research that shows how NLP can be integrated in an organic way into the toolbox of traditional sociological methods. To reach this aim, we plan to combine automated text analytics with not only qualitative discursive analysis but also traditional quantitative statistical methods.

The project used or further developed several tools of NLP (structural topic model, biterm topic model, dynamic word embedding, document embedding, keyness analysis), which had no or only occasionally been used in Hungarian sociological research. NLP was integrated into the traditional text analytical tools of Sociology and combined with qualitative tools. According to our results, these methods can successfully measure political polarization and map the dynamics of relations between actors in the public sphere, the framing of topics in public discourse, changes in framing, or changes in the meaning of certain key concepts.

We consider our research to has been successfully completed in in terms of both the research results and publications, the implemented innovative methodological approaches and the established new research collaborations Below is a summary dated December 2023.

Publications, disseminations

The output of the research is several times higher than what was committed in the application. 48 scientific publications have been produced (with a total impact factor of 9.6), of which 11 have been published in peer-reviewed journals and 4 are under review. Of these, 7 international articles (3 D1 and 3 Q2), 4 national articles, 10 international conference presentations. One of the D1 articles of the project (authored by Barna-Knap) won the Polányi Prize for the best sociological article of the year in 2023, awarded by the Hungarian Sociological Association.

The list at the bottom of this page provides only a selection of the four dozen publications (also identifiable in MTMT), with only the final, highest-ranking publication from each sub-project. A special issue of the journal Intersections on the topic of our research (‘Text as data – Eastern and Central European political discourses from the perspective of computational social science’), initiated and partly guest-edited by members of our research team, is scheduled to appear in 2024, with four articles from the research under review.

We have also organised a conference and several conference sessions. In the summer of 2021, Ildikó Barna and Renáta Németh organised a session at the international conference of the ISA RC33 committee (‘Natural Language Processing: a New Tool in the Methodological Tool-Box of Sociology’), where we also presented our research. In October 2023, our members (Zsófia Rakovics, Eszter Katona, Emese Tóth) organized a session at the Hungarian Sociological Society’s Annual Meeting entitled ‘Natural Language Processing in the Social Sciences’, where we also presented our research.

We have reached out to the wider public in various forums, and besides our website and Facebook page, we have held six educational presentations: we gave a presentation and participated in a roundtable at the Night of Researchers, the Mihály Táncsics Talent College and the Róbert Angelusz Social Sciences College, we participated in the ConTEXT business conference, and Márton Rakovics gave a lecture at the invitation of the University of Osijek at the Faculty of Law in September 2023.

Research recruitment education, new scientific relationships

We were also able to use the research in the training of young researchers: 3 PhD theses were successfully advertised, with Jakab Buda, Zsófia Rakovics, Emese Tóth joining the research, details of their topics can be found below. Four doctoral and one postdoctoral New National Excellence Program (now University Research Scholarship Program, EKÖP) supported research, theses and TDK (Scientific Student Council) theses were linked to the project. We also integrated the research methodology and results into our taught courses.

As the project has progressed, collaborations have been established that have allowed for deeper analysis as a new interdisciplinary research direction. Thus, we worked with social psychologist Bori Simonovits, political scientists Gábor Simonovits and Anna Unger, human geographer Péter Balogh, religious researcher András Máté-Tóth and narrative psychologist Tibor Pólya as co-authors.

Innovative methodological solutions

Another important output of the project is the testing and introduction of innovative methodological approaches. Several approaches and NLP tools were used and partly developed (structural topic model, biterm topic model, dynamic word embedding, document embedding, keyness analysis), which had no or only occasionally been used in domestic social research. These are discussed in more detail in the scientific results below.

One of the biggest challenges of the project was the collection of the corpus. According to the basic concept of the research, three levels of public (political, media and lay public) were distinguished and the corpora were collected accordingly. The creation of the media corpus was the most human resource-intensive task, with four Master’s students and three junior researchers working on it from the first year of the project, in professional cooperation with the Centre for Digital Humanities (ELTE DH) of ELTE University of Applied Sciences. The corpus was built following the methodology developed by Indig and co-authors (Indig B. et al, 2020), under the guidance of Árpád Knap, one of the authors of the referenced work. The specificity of corpus construction is that the corpus was carefully metadata-edited and archival-edited, solving technical challenges such as different medium structure, filtration of duplicates or multiple page’s structure. The task was completed by mid-2022, and the corpus became part of a repository maintained by ELTE DH and accessible for academic research on the Zenodo platform (https://zenodo.org).

To process the corpus, we needed a standardized cleaning and pre-processing pipeline developed for Hungarian. The stages of this process were: character standardization, filtering of the texts for certain aspects, cleaning and filtering of the words, word formatting and standardization of the words. For Hungarian, there are several linguistic solutions for these tasks, and after reviewing them, we have created a convention pipeline in Python on GitHub, to which we provide access on request.

 

Scientific results

Methodological results

Topic: Using NLP to research political polarisation in general

Related publication: Németh, Renáta (2023): A scoping review on the use of natural language processing in research on political polarization: trends and research prospects. Journal of Computational Social Science

 

The article provided the methodological basis for the project. It summarised studies published on the topic since 2010 to clarify how the NLP research paradigm conceptualises and operationalises political polarisation, looking for patterns to follow and trying to identify research white spots that our research might aspire to fill.

 

Topic: How to measure political polarisation? Proposing a linguistically grounded metric

Related Publication: Buda Jakab, Németh Renáta, Simonovits Bori, Simonovits Gábor (2022): The language of discrimination: assessing attention discrimination by Hungarian local governments. Language Resources and Evaluation

 

In our project, we considered polarization as a supervised machine learning problem, and investigated the effectiveness of predicting the author’s party affiliation based on, for example, speeches of members of parliament belonging to different parties, and this effectiveness also served as a general measure of polarization. In this pilot work, we used the text of municipal office emails (i.e. not yet political texts) written to (putative) Roma and non-Roma clients to show that differences in textual data can be detected automatically without human coding, and that machine learning can detect distinguishing features that human coders might not recognise. Our study has also attempted to perform a task of primary importance in polarization research, the interpretation of models, i.e., the identification of the linguistic features that the algorithm recognizes behind the distinction.

 

Topic: How can changes in the meaning of political expressions be investigated? An NLP-based solution proposal

Related publication: Rakovics Zsófia (2022): Temporal Positive Pointwise Mutual Information (TPPMI) időbeli szóbeágyazási modell alkalmazásában rejlő lehetőségek demonstrálása – A miniszterelnöki beszédek szavainak jelentésváltozása. [Demonstrationg potentials in the application of the Temporal Positive Pointwise Mutual Information (TPPMI) temporal word-embedding model – The change in meaning of the words in the prime ministers’ speeches] In: Feledy, A. & Egle, B. (Eds.), Van új a nap alatt: Az ELTE Angelusz Róbert Társadalomtudományi Szakkollégium konferenciájának tanulmánykötete [There is something new under the sun: Proceedings of the conference of the Angelusz Róbert College for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences at ELTE.

The author is currently working with Márton Rakovics on an international publication to present the results.

One of the main issues of our project, the method developed to investigate the changing meanings of political concepts, is described. It proposes to quantitatively investigate semantic dynamics by means of a temporal word embedding model developed for this purpose.

 

Topic: Sociological application challenges of supervised machine learning

Related publication: Németh, Renáta (2021): A felügyelt gépi tanulás kihívásai a szociológiai alkalmazásokban. [The challenges of supervised machine learning in sociological applications] Metszetek – Társadalomtudományi folyóirat, Big Data special issue.

The sociological applications of supervised machine learning, already well demonstrated in industrial/business applications, raise specific questions. The reason for this specificity is that in these applications the algorithm is responsible for learning complex concepts. This paper provides a summary of these challenges and possible solutions.

 

Topic: the integration of NLP into sociological methodology

Related publication: Németh, Renáta; Koltai, Júlia (2023): Natural language processing: The integration of a new methodological paradigm into sociology. Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics

Integrating NLP into sociology faces a number of challenges. NLP has been institutionalised outside sociology, while sociology has built its expertise on its own research methods. Another challenge is epistemological: it relates to the validity of digital data and the different perspectives associated with predictive and causal approaches. In our paper we have offered some possible solutions to these challenges.

Results in content

In the research, we attempted to map the discourses in the official political, media and social media layers of the Hungarian public between 2000 and 2020 (see figure below).

A sociological analysis of the official, media-based and lay online public sphere using automated text analytics and critical discourse analysis

A research project supported by NKFIH (National Research, Development and Innovation Office) (K-134428)

Period of support: December 2020-December 2023

Date of the report: 20. December 2023.

Principal Investigator: Renáta Németh

Participants: Ildikó Barna, Jakab Buda, Eszter Katona, Árpád Knap, Tibor Pólya (HUN-REN TTK), Márton Rakovics, Zsófia Rakovics, Domonkos Sik, Emese Tóth, Anna Unger

 

Summary

The public sphere is the cornerstone of modern representative democracies: it is responsible not only for providing the voters with the necessary information for a deliberate vote but also to keep the administrative system in check not solely from a legal but also from a moral standpoint. In this sense, the prospect of averting those potential distortions and crises which may emerge in democratic systems depend on the quality of the public sphere (Habermas 1975, 1998). The emergence of the online public sphere overlaps with several waves of significant political transformations and reconfigurations of the political field in Hungary. Therefore, Hungary is a particularly rich context for this research.

The research provided a sociological analysis of the public discourse of the last two decades at different levels of the Hungarian public sphere – the official political sphere, the online media and the online lay public – focusing on a few key aspects, mainly based on the automated analysis of large text corpora. We have explored the linguistic representation of political polarization, the discourse of memory politics, collective identity issues and certain public policy topics.

Digital data produced in online public spheres are primarily textual. Such data require analytical tools, which became accessible only recently with the emergence of the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) capable of processing large-scale textual data in a systematic, automated way. These innovative tools provide suitable depth in results for sociology (Németh and Koltai, 2020). Sociology will exploit the potential of these changes if it can renew its research culture while preserving its critical reflections. Hence it was our mission to plan a research that shows how NLP can be integrated in an organic way into the toolbox of traditional sociological methods. To reach this aim, we plan to combine automated text analytics with not only qualitative discursive analysis but also traditional quantitative statistical methods.

The project used or further developed several tools of NLP (structural topic model, biterm topic model, dynamic word embedding, document embedding, keyness analysis), which had no or only occasionally been used in Hungarian sociological research. NLP was integrated into the traditional text analytical tools of Sociology and combined with qualitative tools. According to our results, these methods can successfully measure political polarization and map the dynamics of relations between actors in the public sphere, the framing of topics in public discourse, changes in framing, or changes in the meaning of certain key concepts.

We consider our research to has been successfully completed in in terms of both the research results and publications, the implemented innovative methodological approaches and the established new research collaborations Below is a summary dated December 2023.

Publications, disseminations

The output of the research is several times higher than what was committed in the application. 48 scientific publications have been produced (with a total impact factor of 9.6), of which 11 have been published in peer-reviewed journals and 4 are under review. Of these, 7 international articles (3 D1 and 3 Q2), 4 national articles, 10 international conference presentations. One of the D1 articles of the project (authored by Barna-Knap) won the Polányi Prize for the best sociological article of the year in 2023, awarded by the Hungarian Sociological Association.

The list at the bottom of this page provides only a selection of the four dozen publications (also identifiable in MTMT), with only the final, highest-ranking publication from each sub-project. A special issue of the journal Intersections on the topic of our research (‘Text as data – Eastern and Central European political discourses from the perspective of computational social science’), initiated and partly guest-edited by members of our research team, is scheduled to appear in 2024, with four articles from the research under review.

We have also organised a conference and several conference sessions. In the summer of 2021, Ildikó Barna and Renáta Németh organised a session at the international conference of the ISA RC33 committee (‘Natural Language Processing: a New Tool in the Methodological Tool-Box of Sociology’), where we also presented our research. In October 2023, our members (Zsófia Rakovics, Eszter Katona, Emese Tóth) organized a session at the Hungarian Sociological Society’s Annual Meeting entitled ‘Natural Language Processing in the Social Sciences’, where we also presented our research.

We have reached out to the wider public in various forums, and besides our website and Facebook page, we have held six educational presentations: we gave a presentation and participated in a roundtable at the Night of Researchers, the Mihály Táncsics Talent College and the Róbert Angelusz Social Sciences College, we participated in the ConTEXT business conference, and Márton Rakovics gave a lecture at the invitation of the University of Osijek at the Faculty of Law in September 2023.

Research recruitment education, new scientific relationships

We were also able to use the research in the training of young researchers: 3 PhD theses were successfully advertised, with Jakab Buda, Zsófia Rakovics, Emese Tóth joining the research, details of their topics can be found below. Four doctoral and one postdoctoral New National Excellence Program (now University Research Scholarship Program, EKÖP) supported research, theses and TDK (Scientific Student Council) theses were linked to the project. We also integrated the research methodology and results into our taught courses.

As the project has progressed, collaborations have been established that have allowed for deeper analysis as a new interdisciplinary research direction. Thus, we worked with social psychologist Bori Simonovits, political scientists Gábor Simonovits and Anna Unger, human geographer Péter Balogh, religious researcher András Máté-Tóth and narrative psychologist Tibor Pólya as co-authors.

Innovative methodological solutions

Another important output of the project is the testing and introduction of innovative methodological approaches. Several approaches and NLP tools were used and partly developed (structural topic model, biterm topic model, dynamic word embedding, document embedding, keyness analysis), which had no or only occasionally been used in domestic social research. These are discussed in more detail in the scientific results below.

One of the biggest challenges of the project was the collection of the corpus. According to the basic concept of the research, three levels of public (political, media and lay public) were distinguished and the corpora were collected accordingly. The creation of the media corpus was the most human resource-intensive task, with four Master’s students and three junior researchers working on it from the first year of the project, in professional cooperation with the Centre for Digital Humanities (ELTE DH) of ELTE University of Applied Sciences. The corpus was built following the methodology developed by Indig and co-authors (Indig B. et al, 2020), under the guidance of Árpád Knap, one of the authors of the referenced work. The specificity of corpus construction is that the corpus was carefully metadata-edited and archival-edited, solving technical challenges such as different medium structure, filtration of duplicates or multiple page’s structure. The task was completed by mid-2022, and the corpus became part of a repository maintained by ELTE DH and accessible for academic research on the Zenodo platform (https://zenodo.org).

To process the corpus, we needed a standardized cleaning and pre-processing pipeline developed for Hungarian. The stages of this process were: character standardization, filtering of the texts for certain aspects, cleaning and filtering of the words, word formatting and standardization of the words. For Hungarian, there are several linguistic solutions for these tasks, and after reviewing them, we have created a convention pipeline in Python on GitHub, to which we provide access on request.

 

Scientific results

Methodological results

Topic: Using NLP to research political polarisation in general

Related publication: Németh, Renáta (2023): A scoping review on the use of natural language processing in research on political polarization: trends and research prospects. Journal of Computational Social Science

 

The article provided the methodological basis for the project. It summarised studies published on the topic since 2010 to clarify how the NLP research paradigm conceptualises and operationalises political polarisation, looking for patterns to follow and trying to identify research white spots that our research might aspire to fill.

 

Topic: How to measure political polarisation? Proposing a linguistically grounded metric

Related Publication: Buda Jakab, Németh Renáta, Simonovits Bori, Simonovits Gábor (2022): The language of discrimination: assessing attention discrimination by Hungarian local governments. Language Resources and Evaluation

 

In our project, we considered polarization as a supervised machine learning problem, and investigated the effectiveness of predicting the author’s party affiliation based on, for example, speeches of members of parliament belonging to different parties, and this effectiveness also served as a general measure of polarization. In this pilot work, we used the text of municipal office emails (i.e. not yet political texts) written to (putative) Roma and non-Roma clients to show that differences in textual data can be detected automatically without human coding, and that machine learning can detect distinguishing features that human coders might not recognise. Our study has also attempted to perform a task of primary importance in polarization research, the interpretation of models, i.e., the identification of the linguistic features that the algorithm recognizes behind the distinction.

 

Topic: How can changes in the meaning of political expressions be investigated? An NLP-based solution proposal

Related publication: Rakovics Zsófia (2022): Temporal Positive Pointwise Mutual Information (TPPMI) időbeli szóbeágyazási modell alkalmazásában rejlő lehetőségek demonstrálása – A miniszterelnöki beszédek szavainak jelentésváltozása. [Demonstrationg potentials in the application of the Temporal Positive Pointwise Mutual Information (TPPMI) temporal word-embedding model – The change in meaning of the words in the prime ministers’ speeches] In: Feledy, A. & Egle, B. (Eds.), Van új a nap alatt: Az ELTE Angelusz Róbert Társadalomtudományi Szakkollégium konferenciájának tanulmánykötete [There is something new under the sun: Proceedings of the conference of the Angelusz Róbert College for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences at ELTE.

The author is currently working with Márton Rakovics on an international publication to present the results.

One of the main issues of our project, the method developed to investigate the changing meanings of political concepts, is described. It proposes to quantitatively investigate semantic dynamics by means of a temporal word embedding model developed for this purpose.

 

Topic: Sociological application challenges of supervised machine learning

Related publication: Németh, Renáta (2021): A felügyelt gépi tanulás kihívásai a szociológiai alkalmazásokban. [The challenges of supervised machine learning in sociological applications] Metszetek – Társadalomtudományi folyóirat, Big Data special issue.

The sociological applications of supervised machine learning, already well demonstrated in industrial/business applications, raise specific questions. The reason for this specificity is that in these applications the algorithm is responsible for learning complex concepts. This paper provides a summary of these challenges and possible solutions.

 

Topic: the integration of NLP into sociological methodology

Related publication: Németh, Renáta; Koltai, Júlia (2023): Natural language processing: The integration of a new methodological paradigm into sociology. Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics

Integrating NLP into sociology faces a number of challenges. NLP has been institutionalised outside sociology, while sociology has built its expertise on its own research methods. Another challenge is epistemological: it relates to the validity of digital data and the different perspectives associated with predictive and causal approaches. In our paper we have offered some possible solutions to these challenges.

Results in content

In the research, we attempted to map the discourses in the official political, media and social media layers of the Hungarian public between 2000 and 2020 (see figure below).

Related doctoral researches

Sociological study of language change and -polarization

Doctoral student: Zsófia Rakovics

Advisors: Renáta Németh, PhD and Domonkos Sik, PhD

Analysing the discourse of sustainability in the triad of political publicity, online media platforms and the lay public

Doctoral student: Emese Tóth

Advisor: Balázs János Kocsis, PhD

Explainable Neural Language Models and their Application in Social Sciences

Doctoral student: Jakab Buda

Advisor: Renáta Németh, PhD

 

Publications published in the framework of the project (selected list)

 

Csomor, Gábor; Simonovits, Borbála; Németh, Renáta: Hivatali diszkrimináció?: Egy online terepkísérlet eredményei, Szociológiai Szemle, 2021

Katona, Eszter, Németh, Renáta: Automatizált szöveganalitika a korrupció kutatásában, SOCIO.HU: TÁRSADALOMTUDOMÁNYI SZEMLE, 2021

Barna, Ildikó; Knap, Árpád: Analysis of the Thematic Structure and Discursive Framing in Articles about Trianon and the Holocaust in the Online Hungarian Press Using LDA Topic Modelling., NATIONALITIES PAPERS, 2022

Boda Zsuzsanna, Rakovics Zsófia: Orbán Viktor 2010 és 2020 közötti beszédeinek elemzése: A migráció témájának vizsgálata, Szociológiai Szemle, 2022

Buda Jakab, Németh Renáta, Simonovits Bori, Simonovits Gábor: The language of discrimination: assessing attention discrimination by Hungarian local governments, Language Resources and Evaluation, 2022

Buda, Jakab ; Simonovits, Bori ; Németh, Renáta: Hivatali diszkrimináció? – Figyelemdiszkrimináció mérése természetes nyelvfeldolgozással, Konferencia előadás, Szöveg.Gép.Társadalom – Társadalmi viszonyok megragadása szöveges adatok számítógépes elemzésével., Az ELTE Reserach Center for Computational Social, 2022

Knap Árpád, Bartha Diána, Barna Ildikó: Trianon és a holokauszt emlékezetpolitikai jellegzetességeinek elemzése természetesnyelv-feldolgozás használatával, Szociológiai Szemle, 2022

Knap, Árpád ; Tóth, Tímea Emese ; Barna, Ildikó: Érzelmek megjelenése a Trianoni békeszerződéssel és a holokauszttal kapcsolatos cikkek szóbeágyazásaiban, az érzelmek automatizált detektálásának lehetséges eszközei, Konferencia előadás, Szöveg.Gép.Társadalom – Társadalmi viszonyok megragadása szöveges adatok számítógépes elemzésével., Az ELTE Reserach Center for Computational Social, 2022

Németh Renáta: A szakterületi tudás (domain knowledge) szerepe az adattudomány társadalomkutatási alkalmazásaiban, In: Loncsák, Noémi; Szabó-Tóth, Kinga (szerk.) Szociológiai tudás és közjó : absztraktkötet. Miskolc, Magyarország : Magyar Szociológiai Társaság (2022) 247 p. pp. 158-15, 2022

Németh Renáta: Nyelvi polarizáció kutatása NLP-vel: módszertani kihívások (általánosíthatóság, oksági tévkövetkeztetés), Gép.Társadalom – Társadalmi viszonyok megragadása szöveges adatok számítógépes elemzésével., Az ELTE Research Center for Computational Social Science konferenciája. 2022.

Rakovics Zsófia: Migrációs diskurzusok elemzése a parlamenti felszólalások alapján, Magyar Szociológiai Társaság (MSZT) Vándorgyűlés, Szociológiai tudás és közjó, Miskolci Egyetem, 2022. október 14-15., 2022

Rakovics Zsófia és Rakovics Márton: Parlamenti felszólalások elemzése dokumentumbeágyazással. Szöveg.Gép.Társadalom – Társadalmi viszonyok megragadása szöveges adatok számítógépes elemzésével, Szöveg.Gép.Társadalom – Társadalmi viszonyok megragadása szöveges adatok számítógépes elemzésével., Az ELTE Reserach Center for Computational Social Science konferenciája, 2022

Rakovics, Zsófia; Rakovics, Márton: Semantic evolution of words in Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán’s speeches using a temporal word embedding model focusing on the issue of migration, Konferencia megjelenés (poszter) a 8. Nemzetközi Számítógépes Társadalomtudomány Konferencián (8th International Conference on Computational Social Science IC2S2). 2022., 2022

Sik Domonkos: A poiesis autonómiája – a társadalmi struktúrák és a diszkurzív lehetőségterek kölcsönhatása, A társadalomelmélet alapkérdései – konferencia a Nemzeti Közszolgálati Egyetemen, 2022. november 3-4., 2022

Tóth Tímea Emese: Analysis of the Twitter Discourse on Sustainability Using Natural Language Processing, Education of Economists & Managers, 2022

Tóth Tímea Emese: A fenntarthatósággal kapcsolatos Twitter-diskurzus elemzése a természetes nyelvi feldolgozás módszerével, “Kit érdekel még a szociológia?” – konferencia, Társadalomtudományi Kutatóközpont, 2022.06.03., 2022

Tóth Tímea Emese: Hogyan definiálta újra a COVID-19 pandémia a fenntarthatóság fogalmát a laikus nyilvánosságban? Narratívák és kommunikációs stratégiák, Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem. 2022.08.31., 2022

Tóth Tímea Emese: Minden, amit a fenntarthatóságról és klímaváltozásról tudni akartál, de nem merted megkérdezni, Táncsis Mihály Tehetséggondozó Kollégium Budapest. 2022.03.09., 2022

Barna, Ildikó; Németh, Renáta; Pólya, Tibor; Berbekár, Réka: Examining the Different Political Sides’ Memorialization of Using Tools of Natural Language Processing and Narrative Psychology, XX. ISA World Congress of Sociology, 2023. jún. 25-júl. 1, 2023

Katona, Eszter; Németh, Renáta: Carpathian Basin-related topics in Hungarian parliamentary speeches. A concept related to Hungary’s self-definition, CENTRAL Workshop: Notion and Construction of Victimhood in Central East and Southeast Europe. 2023. február 8-10. Bécs, 2023

Máté-Tóth, András; Rakovics, Zsófia: The discourse of christianity in Viktor Orbán’s rhetoric, Religions, 2023

Németh Renáta: A scoping review on the use of natural language processing in research on political polarization: trends and research prospects, Journal of Computational Social Science , 25 p., 2023

Németh Renáta, Katona Eszter, Balogh Péter, Rakovics Zsófia, Unger Anna: What else comes with a geographical concept beyond geography? Discourses related to the Carpathian Basin in the Hungarian Parliament, bírálat alatt, 2023

Németh Renáta, Rakovics Zsófia: A természetesnyelv-feldolgozás néhány szociológiai alkalmazásáról, SciComp 2023 konferencia. Budapest, 2023. november 7-8., 2023

Németh, Renáta; Barna, Ildikó; Pólya, Tibor: Az NLP kísérleti kombinálása narratív pszichológiai gépi elemzővel – A trianoni békeszerződés a magyar online médiában a 100. évfordulón, A Magyar Szociológiai Társaság 2023. évi vándorgyűlése, Corvinus Egyetem, Budapest, 2023., 2023

Németh, Renáta; Buda, Jakab; Simonovits, Bori: The Language of Discrimination: Assessing Attention Discrimination By Hungarian Local Governments Using Machine Learning, XX. ISA World Congress of Sociology, 2023. jún. 25-júl. 1., 2023

Németh, Renáta; Buda, Jakab; Simonovits, Bori: Who knows it better? The task of detecting discrimination using human coding vs. text mining, EuMePo (European Memory Politics) Jean Monnet Network Conference, Budapest, 2023. június 15., 2023

Németh, Renáta; Koltai, Júlia: Natural language processing: The integration of a new methodological paradigm into sociology, INTERSECTIONS: EAST EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIETY AND POLITICS 9: 1 pp. 5-22., 2023

Rakovics Zsófia: Memory politics in the Hungarian Parliament, CENTRAL workshop: Notion and Construction of Victimhood in Cenral East and Southeast Europe. Vienna, 8-10 February, 2023, 2023

Rakovics Zsófia: Investigating language- and political polarization through two decades of parliamentary speeches, XX. ISA World Congress of Sociology. 25 June – 1 July, 2023, 2023

Rakovics Zsófia: Investigating dynamic social networks of politicians constructed by the similarity of their speeches, XX. ISA World Congress of Sociology. 25 June – 1 July, 2023, 2023

Rakovics Zsófia: Szóbeágyazások és nagy nyelvmodellek társadalomtudományi alkalmazásának példái, conTEXT 2023 – Change the game? Budapest, CEU, 2023. november 14., 2023

Rakovics Zsófia, Barna Ildikó: The stages of Jobbik becoming a people’s party Analyzing the parliamentary speeches of Jobbik and the dynamic network of its politicians between 2010 and 2020, bírálat alatt, 2023

Rakovics Zsófia, Rakovics Márton: Language- and political polarization of parliamentary speeches between 1998-2020, 9th International Conference on Computational Social Science. Copenhagen, 17-20 July, 2023, 2023

Sik Domonkos, Rakovics Zsófia, Németh Renáta: Towards a culture of disrespect – topic modeling Hungarian parliamentary discourses, bírálat alatt, 2023

Sik, Domonkos: Populist Juggling with Fear: The Case of Hungary, EAST EUROPEAN POLITICS AND SOCIETIES 37 : 4 pp. 1291-1313. , 23 p, 2023

Szalay Áron, Rakovics Zsófia: Tuned to Fear – Analyzing Viktor Orbán’s State of the Nation Addresses, focusing on the enemy images identified in the National Consultation, bírálat alatt, 2023

Tóth Tímea Emese: Hogyan kapcsolódik a koronavírus és a fenntarthatóság az online média kommunikációjában?, Táncsics Mihály Tehetséggondozó Kollégium. Budapest. 2023.04.25., 2023

Tóth Tímea Emese: A fenntarthatóság politikai polarizáció által keretezett narratív lehetőségei az online média felületeken, Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem. 2023.08.31., 2023

Tóth Tímea Emese: Hogyan hatott a koronavírus-járvány a fenntarthatósági diskurzusra?, Magyar Szociológiai Társaság Éves Vándorgyűlése 2023. Válságról válságra. Budapest. 2023.11.18., 2023

Verebes Ingrid, Rakovics Zsófia: A család diskurzusának alakulása az 1998-2020 közötti parlamenti felszólalásokban, MSZT 2023. évi vándorgyűlés. Budapest, BCE, 2023. november 17-18., 2023

Related Results

Jakab Buda gave a presentation at the CEU Doctoral Students Conference in Vienna

2024.04.17. Presentation

Jakab Buda, member of our research centre, gave a presentation at the CEU Doctoral Student Conference in Vienna on 17 April 2024, in connection with his doctoral research, entitled "The language of power – a machine learning based quantitative content analysis of 20 years of political discourse in the Hungarian [...]

View Result Details

Eszter Katona presented her research co-authored by Renáta Németh at the EDC 2024 conference in Warsaw

2024.03.01. Presentation

Our research group member Eszter Katona was in Warsaw on 3 March, 2024, where she successfully presented her research at the EDC 2024 (Elections - Democracy - Crisis) conference (co-authored by Renáta Németh, supported by the New National Excellence Programme and the recently completed NKFIH-K research of our research group). [...]

View Result Details

Zsófia Rakovics gave a presentation at the conTEXT conference

2023.11.14. Presentation

Zsófia Rakovics, a member of our research group, participated in the conTEXT conference organised by Clementine, where she spoke about the applications of word embeddings and large language models in social sciences. The conference took place at CEU on 14 November 2023, its Hungarian website can be accessed here.

View Result Details

Renáta Németh and Zsófia Rakovics gave a presentation at the SciComp23 conference

2023.11.07. Presentation

The newly established Institute of Scientific Computing held its first SciComp23 conference on 7-8 November 2023 in Budapest. Our research group was also represented at the conference by Zsófia Rakovics and Renáta Németh, who gave a presentation entitled "Some sociological applications of natural language processing".

View Result Details

Márton Rakovics gave a presentation at the University of Osijek

2023.09.18. Presentation

On 15 September 2023, Márton Rakovics, a member of our Research Centre (ELTE RC2S2), gave a lecture in English on the social science applications of natural language processing at the Faculty of Law, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, in Croatia. In his presentation, he introduced the most important text [...]

View Result Details

Conference poster presented at the 9th IC2S2 conference by Zsófia Rakovics and Márton Rakovics

2023.07.20. Presentation

Two members of our research center took part in the 9. International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2) in Denmark. The event is organized by the University of Copenhagen in the Maersk Tower between 17-20th of July. Below we share some photos of the conference venue and atmosphere. Zsófia Rakovics [...]

View Result Details

Zsófia Rakovics gave a presentation at the ISA World Congress of Sociology in Melbourne

2023.06.30. Presentation

Zsófia Rakovics gave az online presentation at the ISA (International Sociological Association) World Congress organised in Melbourne between 25th June – 1st July, 2023. The title of the presentation was Investigating Language- and Political Polarization through Two Decades of Parliamentary Speeches. More details: Abstract is available here The conference’s site

View Result Details

Zsófia Rakovics gave a presentation at the ISA World Congress of Sociology in Melbourne

2023.06.30. Presentation

Zsófia Rakovics gave an online presentation at the ISA (International Sociological Association) World Congress organised in Melbourne between 25th June – 1st July, 2023. The title of the presentation was Investigating Dynamic Social Networks of Politicians Constructed By the Similarity of Their Speeches. More details: Abstract is available here The [...]

View Result Details

Renáta Németh gave a presentation at the ISA World Congress of Sociology in Melbourne

2023.06.30. Presentation

Renáta Németh gave az online presentation at the ISA (International Sociological Association) World Congress organised in Melbourne between 25th June – 1st July, 2023. The title of the presentation is The language of discrimination: Assessing attention discrimination by Hungarian local governments using machine learning, the authors were Renáta Németh (ELTE [...]

View Result Details

Ildikó Barna gave a presentation at the ISA World Congress of Sociology in Melbourne

2023.06.30. Presentation

Ildikó Barna gave az online presentation at the ISA (International Sociological Association) World Congress organised in Melbourne between 25th June – 1st July, 2023. The title of the presentation is Examining the Different Political Sides’ Memorialization of Using Tools of Natural Language Processing and Narrative Psychology, the authors were Ildikó [...]

View Result Details

Ildikó Barna gave a presentation at the EuMePo (European Memory Politics) Jean Monnet Network conference organised in Budapest

2023.06.15. Presentation

Ildikó Barna gave a presentation titled "An analysis on the framing of Trianon and the Holocaust in Hungary using Natural Language Processing" at the EuMePo (European Memory Politics) Jean Monnet Network conference  on 15th June, 2023, Budapest, co-authored by Árpád Knap. In their research, they examined the discursive framing of [...]

View Result Details

Renáta Németh gave a presentation at the EuMePo (European Memory Politics) Jean Monnet Network conference organised in Budapest

2023.06.15. Presentation

Renáta Németh gave a presentation titled "Who knows it better? The task of detecting discrimination using human coding vs. text mining" at the EuMePo (European Memory Politics) Jean Monnet Network conference  on 15th June, 2023, Budapest. The co-authors were Jakab Buda and Bori Simonovits. In their study they assess the [...]

View Result Details

Zsófia Rakovics gave a presentation at the EuMePo (European Memory Politics) Jean Monnet Network conference organised in Budapest

2023.06.15. Presentation

Zsófia Rakovics gave a presentation titled "Memory politics – Different issues and political communication strategies in the Hungarian Parliament" at the EuMePo (European Memory Politics) Jean Monnet Network conference  on 15th June, 2023, Budapest. The motivation of the research is to analyze the themes of memory politics and the dynamics [...]

View Result Details

Németh, Renáta and Koltai, Júlia (2023): Natural language processing: The integration of a new methodological paradigm into sociology

2023.06.15. Publication

Renáta Németh and Júlia Koltai’s article entitled "Natural language processing: the integration of a new methodological paradigm into sociology" was published inthe journal Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics. Renáta Németh, one of the authors of the article, wrote the article with the support of our NKFIH research, [...]

View Result Details

Sik, Domonkos (2023): Populist Juggling with Fear: The Case of Hungary

2023.03.08. Publication

Domonkos Sik published his results in the journal called East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures with the following title: " Populist Juggling with Fear: The Case of Hungary".

View Result Details

Rakovics, Zsófia (2023): Memory Politics in the Hungarian Parliament

2023.02.11. Presentation

Zsófia Rakovics gave a presentation entitled " Memory Politics in the Hungarian Parliament " at the CENTRAL Workshop: Notion and Construction of Victimhood in Central East and Southeast Europe, held in Vienna, 8-11 February 2023.

View Result Details

Katona, Eszter and Németh, Renáta (2023): Carpathian Basin-related topics in Hungarian parliamentary speeches. A concept related to Hungary’s self-definition Katona, Eszter and Németh, Renáta (2023): Carpathian Basin-related topics in Hungarian parliamentary speeches. A concept related to Hungary’s self-definition

2023.02.11. Presentation

Eszter Katona and Renáta Németh gave a presentation entitled " Carpathian Basin-related topics in Hungarian parliamentary speeches. A concept related to Hungary’s self-definition " at the CENTRAL Workshop: Notion and Construction of Victimhood in Central East and Southeast Europe, held in Vienna, 8-11 February 2023.

View Result Details

Boda, Zsuzsanna and Rakovics, Zsófia (2022): Analysis of Viktor Orbán’s speeches between 2010 and 2020: Investigating the issue of migration

2022.12.12. Publication

Zsuzsanna Boda and Zsófia Rakovics published their results in the journal Szociológiai Szemle with the following title: " Analysis of Viktor Orbán’s speeches between 2010 and 2020: Investigating the issue of migration".

View Result Details

Németh, Renáta (2022): A scoping review on the use of natural language processing in research on political polarization: trends and research prospects

2022.11.29. Publication

Renáta Németh published her results in the Journal of Computational Social Science with the following title: "A scoping review on the use of natural language processing in research on political polarization: trends and research prospects".

View Result Details

Lecture by Domonkos Sik at the conference “Fundamental Issues of Social Theory”

2022.11.04. Előadás

Domonkos Sik gave a conference presentation entitled "The autonomy of poiesis - the interaction of social structures and discursive possibilities" at the conference "The Fundamental issues of social theory" at the National University of Public Service (3-4 November 2022).

View Result Details

Zsófia Rakovics gave a presentation at the Hungarian Sociological Assocation’s annual meeting

2022.10.15. Presentation

Zsófia Rakovics presented her research results entitled "Analysis of migration discourses based on parliamentary speeches" at the Hungarian Sociological Association’s annual meeting between the 14th and 15th October, 2022 (hosted by the University of Miskolc). The presentation was part of the ’Challenges of international migration’ section.

View Result Details

Renáta Németh gave a presentation at the Hungarian Sociological Assocation’s annual meeting

2022.10.15. Presentation

Renáta Németh presented her research results entitled "The role of domain knowledge in social research applications of data science" at the Hungarian Sociological Association’s annual meeting between the 14th and 15th October, 2022 (hosted by the University of Miskolc). The presentation was part of the ’Quantitative methodological innovations’ section.

View Result Details

Zsófia Rakovics and Márton Rakovics gave a presentation at Text.Machine.Society conference

2022.09.20.

Zsófia Rakovics (ELTE RC2S2) and Márton Rakovics (ELTE RC2S2) gave a presentation at the Text.Machnine.Society conference (organized by ELTE RC2S2) entitled „Analysis of parlementary speeches with document embedding” on 20.09.2022.

View Result Details

Renáta Németh gave a presentation at the Text.Machine.Society conference

2022.09.20.

Renáta Németh (ELTE RC2S2) gave a presentation at the Text.Machnine.Society conference (organized by ELTE RC2S2) entitled „Researching language polarization with NLP: methodological challenges based on a scoping review (generalizability, role of domain knowledge, mixed methods, causal inference)” on 20.09.2022.

View Result Details

Árpád Knap, Tímea Emese Tóth and Ildikó Barna gave a presentation at Text.Machine.Society conference

2022.09.20.

Árpád Knap (ELTE RC2S2), Tímea Emese Tóth (ELTE RC2S2) and Ildikó Barna (ELTE RC2S2) gave a presentation at the Text.Machnine.Society conference (organized by ELTE RC2S2) entitled „Emotions in the word embeddings of articles about Trianon Peace Treaty and the Holocaust, and possible tools for automated emotion detection” on 20.09.2022.

View Result Details

Jakab Buda, Bori Simonovits and Renáta Németh gave a presentation at Text.Machine.Society conference

2022.09.20.

Jakab Buda (ELTE RC2S2), Bori Simonovits (ELTE PPK), Renáta Németh (ELTE RC2S2) gave a presentation at Text.Machine.Society conference (organized by ELTE RC2S2) entitled „Official discrimination? – Measuring attentional discrimination using natural language processing” on 20.09.2022.

View Result Details

Jakab Buda – Renáta Németh – Bori Simonovits – Gábor Simonovits: The language of discrimination: assessing attention discrimination by Hungarian local governments

2022.09.14. Publication

Jakab Buda, Renáta Németh and co-authors published their results in Language Resources and Evaluation (D1).

View Result Details

Rakovics Zsófia (2022): Demonstrating potentials in the application of the Temporal Positive Pointwise Mutual Information (TPPMI) temporal word-embedding model – The change in meaning of the words in the prime ministers’ speeches

2022.07.03. Publication

Zsófia Rakovics’s new publication is out now which is published in the new compilation ’Van új a nap alatt’ from Angelusz Róbert College for Advanced Studies. In relation to our OTKA research, the paper can be accessible in Hungarian.

View Result Details

Zsófia Rakovics, Márton Rakovics (2022): Semantic evolution of words in Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán’s speeches using a temporal word embedding model focusing on the issue of migration

2022.06.22. Conference poster

Zsófia Rakovics and Márton Rakovics will display the results of their research entitled "Semantic evolution of words in Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán's speeches using a temporal word embedding model focusing on the issue of migration" at the poster section of the 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science IC2S2 (The [...]

View Result Details

Domonkos Sik (2022): Populist Juggling with Fear – the Case of Hungary

2022.06.11. Presentation

Domonkos Sik gave a presentation entitled "Populist Juggling with Fear – the Case of Hungary" at The End of “Freedom” in Central and Eastern Europe? Addressing the Challenges of an Illiberal Turn (9-11. June 2022) conference organized by Andrássy University Budapest. 

View Result Details

Zsófia Rakovics (2022): Analyzing the semantic evolution of words related to migration in prime ministerial speeches using a temporal word embedding model

2022.06.03. Presentation

Zsófia Rakovics gave a presentation at the annual conference of the Centre for Social Sciences, entitled "Analyzing the semantic evolution of words related to migration in prime ministerial speeches using a temporal word embedding model" on 3 June, 2022.

View Result Details

Emese Tímea Tóth (2022): Analysis of the Twitter discourse on sustainability using the methods of natural language processing

2022.06.03. Presentation

Tímea Emese Tóth gave a presentation entitled "Analysis of the Twitter discourse on sustainability using the method of natural language processing" at the Centre for Social Sciences' annual conference on June 3, 2022. The performance was a great success, with Emese receiving the Special Award for the Best Doctoral Presentation [...]

View Result Details

Tímea Emese Tóth (2021): Analysis of the Twitter Discourse on Sustainability Using Natural Language Processing

2022.05.24. Publication

Emese Tímea Tóth, a member of our research group, writes about the sustainability discourse on Twitter. Mesi's doctoral topic, related to our OTKA research, examines the discourse of sustainability in the triad of political publicity, online media platforms and the lay public.

View Result Details

Ildikó Barna, Árpád Knap (2022): Analysis of the Thematic Structure and Discursive Framing in Articles about Trianon and the Holocaust in the Online Hungarian Press Using LDA Topic Modelling

2022.05.16. Publication

The latest publication by Ildikó Barna and Árpád Knap was published in the journal Nationalities Papers (D1). In their paper, they examined the thematic structure and discursive framing in newspaper articles related to the Trianon Peace Treaty and the Holocaust using LDA topic models and qualitative analysis. The article is [...]

View Result Details

Zsófia Rakovics (2022): Demonstrating the potential of Temporal Positive Pointwise Mutual Information (TPPMI) temporal word embedding model – Semantic evolution of words in prime ministerial speeches

2022.04.22. Presentation

Zsófia Rakovics gave a presentation entitled Demonstrating the potential of Temporal Positive Pointwise Mutual Information (TPPMI) temporal word embedding model - Semantic evolution of words in prime ministerial speeches at the ’Van új a nap alatt’ conference of the ELTE Angelusz Róbert College for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, 2022.04.22. [...]

View Result Details

Renáta Németh: Challenges of controlled machine learning in sociological applications

2022.01.24. Publication

One our researchers, Renáta Németh has gotten her paper published in the special issue of the journal Metszetek. Renáta examines the feature of controlled machine learning which requires human coding – touching upon ethical questions of crowdsourcing platforms, teachability of hermeneutically more complex terms, or the distortion of AI, the [...]

View Result Details

Árpád Knap, Diána Bartha, Ildikó Barna (2021): Analysing The Memory Politics Of Trianon And The Holocaust Using Natural Language Processing

2022.01.04. Publication

A new publication by members of our research team (Árpád Knap, Diána Bartha, Ildikó Barna) on the memory politics of Trianon and the Holocaust using NLP. Within the “European Memory Politics – Populism, Nationalism and the Challenges to a European Memory Culture (EuMePo)” international research network supported by Jean Monnet [...]

View Result Details

Eszter Katona, Renáta Németh (2021): Automated text analytics in corruption research

2021.05.22. Publication

Our study examines the use and possible applicability of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in corruption research. In our review, we aim to collect and summarize automated text analytics-based corruption research born after 2000. We focus on the prevalence and potential of NLP methods. We found significant differences in the textual [...]

View Result Details

Gábor Csomor – Borbála Simonovits – Renáta Németh (2021): Discrimination at local governments? – Results of an online field experiment

2021.03.20. Publikáció

Gábor Csomor, Borbála Simonovits and Renáta Németh published their results in the journal Szociológiai Szemle with the following title: " Discrimination at local governments? - Results of an online field experiment ".

View Result Details