Estimation of Demographic Traits of the Deputies through Parliamentary Debates Using Machine Learning

Abstract

One of the most impressive applications of the combined use of natural language processing (NLP), classical machine learning, and deep learning (DL) approaches is the estimation of demographic traits from the text. Author Profiling (AP) is the analysis of a text to identify the demographics or characteristics of its author. So far, most researchers in this field have focused on using social media data in the English language. This article aims to expand the predictive potential of demographic traits by focusing on a more diverse dataset and language. Knowing the background of deputies is essential for citizens, political scientists and policymakers. In this study, we present the application of NLP and machine learning (ML) approaches to Turkish parliamentary debates to estimate the demographic traits of the deputies. Seven traits were determined: gender, age, education, occupation, election region, party, and party status. As a first step, a corpus was compiled from Turkish parliamentary debates between 2012 and 2020. Document representations (feature extraction) were performed using various NLP techniques. Then, we created sub-datasets containing the extracted features from the corpus. These sub-datasets were used by different ML classification algorithms. The best classification accuracy rates were more than 31%, 27%, 35%, 41%, 29%, 59%, and 32% according to the majority baseline for gender, age, education, occupation, election region, party, and party status, respectively. The experimental results show that the demographics of deputies can be estimated effectively using NLP, classical ML, and DL approaches.