��Vlog��ý Little Rock research produces quantitative portrait of legislative change in Ukraine

Ajani Oyindamola — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 12:33:47 +0000

Two University of Arkansas at Little Rock researchers have used a novel approach to quantitatively portray legislative change in Ukraine to provide a view into the larger political dynamics of the country. Zachary Stine, a Ph.D. student in computer and information sciences, and his mentor, Dr. Nitin Agarwal, ��Vlog��ý Little Rock Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy endowed chair and professor of information science, used topic modeling to produce a quantitative picture of legislative change in Ukraine over 12 years. “This research gives us a quantitative picture that fits what we believe to be a true representation of Ukrainian politics in real time,” Stine said. “If you are a political scientist, you probably aren’t going to read 17,000 draft laws to understand the political situation. This research gives you a window into the political landscape.” The goal of the research is to quantitatively characterize a political system as an ongoing, unfolding process. The research can be used to explore ideological pathways through a political space, contextualize the voting behaviors of politicians, and trace the evolution of a political system. “We selected Ukraine as a case study because of the U.S.’s strategic and geopolitical interests in Ukraine as it is a vital NATO member, its proximity to Russia, Russia’s meddling in Ukraine’s political system, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Russia’s aggression in eastern Ukraine, and increasing socio-politico-cultural influence of Russia in Ukraine,” Agarwal said. Stine and Agarwal computationally analyzed all draft legislation, more than 17,000 draft laws, produced by the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, between 2006 and 2018. Many politically important events occurred during this time period in Ukraine, including the 2014 ousting of Viktor Yanukovych as president. The time period encompasses the fifth, sixth, seventh, and the majority of the eight convocations, which represent the tenure of a newly elected parliament. “The parliament of Ukraine consists of an ever-changing array of political factions in which membership is fluid,” Stine said. “They aren’t like the U.S. where we have two main political parties. In Ukraine, people may become a politician as part of one political party, but they vote with other parties. This creates some interesting political dynamics.”

Dr. Nitin Agarwal

The researchers used the topic modeling algorithm, latent Dirichlet allocation, to identify word-usage patterns and represent Ukrainian draft laws as a distribution of topics. “As the textual artifacts of a complex political process, Ukrainian draft laws encode the paths explored through a political space on the part of the Verkhova Rada,” Agarwal said. “By condensing each draft law into a distribution of inferred topics, we can measure how surprising a given law is relative to some number of preceding laws using the notion of novelty.” One of the study’s findings was that Ukraine’s greatest legislative changes largely deal with how the country manages relationships with foreign countries. Stine and Agarwal found that the Committee of European Integration and the Committee of Foreign Affairs produce draft bills with the highest novelty value on average. “This is notable in light of the 2013 protests which would lead up to the 2014 revolution and eventual ouster of president Viktor Yanukovych,” Stine said. “These protests were initially motivated by the decisions to break association talks with the European Union, widely seen as a capitulation to Russian interests. The high average novelty of these committees suggests that they have been drivers of legislative innovation and change across these convocations.” Stine presented this study at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock’s 2019 Research and Creative Works Expo, where he received third place in the computer and information science graduate category. They also presented the research at the International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Culturing Modeling, and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation in July. In future research, Stine and Agarwal plan to analyze additional information from legislation approved by Ukraine’s parliament, such as voting records, bill sponsorship, supporting legislative committees, etc. It is hoped that the research one day might be able to identify connections between politicians and political allies and predict how politicians are likely to vote as well as when major political shifts are about to occur. This research is funded in part by the U.S. Office of Naval Research (N00014-17-1-2675) and the Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Endowment at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock.

Social bots disrupt online communication about natural disasters

Ajani Oyindamola — Thu, 24 May 2018 13:01:28 +0000

Researchers at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock are studying how social bots influence the delivery of news via social media during major disasters. The study examines the role of social bots – automated Twitter accounts that attempt to affect or influence the behaviors of others – and their coordination and communication patterns with complex organizational structures to disseminate information during four natural disasters that occurred in 2017. The paper, “Analyzing Social Bots and their Coordination during Natural Disasters,” will be discussed at the International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation to be held July 10-13 in Washington D.C. , a Ph.D. student in computer and information science at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock, is the lead author who will present the paper. She is also a researcher at (Collaboratorium for Social Media and Behavioral Studies) – a research group led by Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of Information Science. Khaund also presented this work at the ��Vlog��ý Little Rock Student Research and Creative Works Showcase and was awarded first place in the graduate student technology division. The paper’s co-authors include Dr. Samer Al-Khateeb, a postdoctoral research fellow at COSMOS, Dr., a research project analyst at the office of Medicaid Inspector General and a postdoctoral research fellow at COSMOS, and Agarwal. Researchers collected data from Twitter during Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria as well as the 7.1-magnitude Central Mexico earthquake that killed 370 people on Sept. 19, 2017. The study resulted in the collection of more than 1.2 million tweets generated by more than 800,000 Twitter accounts. The researchers detected the presence of social bots in the collected dataset and studied the social networks of the top ranked bot accounts as well as the top ranked non-bot accounts (humans) and then compared both networks. They discovered that social bots, which evolve constantly and become more sophisticated as time progresses, can disrupt discourse in online spaces. While humans have more tightly knit online communities, social bots tend to make rather weaker connections that result in a lack of a sense of belonging in the online community. Analysis of their content revealed that the discourse was not just limited to the disaster events. Non-relevant hashtags including hoaxes and alternate narratives were latched on to the event-specific hashtags and were disseminated in Spanish, Arabic, French, and Japanese, among other languages. In future research, COSMOS investigators hope to understand the different strategies that social bots use to coordinate disinformation campaigns in which online discourse is successfully manipulated. The research is supported in part by grants from the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR), U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Maulden-Entergy endowment at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding organizations. Researchers gratefully acknowledge the support.

- University News Archive - ����Vlog��ý Little Rock

����Vlog��ý Little Rock research produces quantitative portrait of legislative change in Ukraine

Social bots disrupt online communication about natural disasters

- University News Archive - ��Vlog��ý Little Rock

��Vlog��ý Little Rock research produces quantitative portrait of legislative change in Ukraine