Lawpol and Lawradar were represented at the ECPR General Conference 2024 in Dublin, Ireland by Marjaana Sjölund. The conference brings together over two thousand political scientists to discuss the latest developments of the field. Our contribution concerned Lawradar (Lakitutka), as we talked about new improvements regarding semantic search and our ideas about a consultation-facilitating chatbot.
Our presentation was held on the very first day of the conference. The panel was titled “Textual Data and NLP in Policy Process Research II”, chaired by Sebastian Sewerin from the University of Zürich and Nihit Goyal from the Delft University of Technology. The other papers in the panel – as well as the “AI” roundtable from earlier that day – gave food for thoughts.
Instead of just presenting Lawradar service is it is now, the presentation focused on an idea about a “legislative chatbot”, that is, a chatbot that could understand the law-making process, and be able to summarise the proposed law changes in a concise but easy-to-understand format. The chatbot could then even consult the user – a private person or a representative of an organisation – how they feel about the law change. This feedback from hundreds or thousands of users could then be summarised to the ministry officials taking charge of drafting the law proposal. Thus, making it possible to scale up the stakeholder consultation in a considerable manner.
The need for easier access to documents and easier consultation resonated with the audience. One concrete example of feedback we got was an encouragement to include an API (Application Programming Interface) to allow people to create their own tools on top of our data. This has been on the development backlog, but the feedback definitely gives it more weight.
I was also really delighted to hear that there are people that remember hearing about Lawradar before – and were happy learning about the newest developments.
After my own presentation was held, the rest of the conference was more about getting to know people and familiarising myself with their research. Two receptions helped with the networking aspect, while the expertly held presentations in a various panels gave more insight into political science.
As for those new ideas collected from the conference, I heard about a research project concerning detecting threat discourses using semantic matching. Looking forward to hearing more about that (and seeing the code!)
PS. Due to the flight schedules I was in Dublin already early on Sunday, giving me time to explore a little. I managed to see a small castle, which is a definite plus for the trip!
