Political Science: Artificial Intelligence Applications

Abstract

Scholars who apply artificial mtelligence to political questions seek, most generally, to expand the scope and relevance of political model analysis. By incorporating the effects of variable human notions, traditions, and meanings, they seek to humanize political models. Most early applications of artificial intelligence in political science research address substantive issues pertaining to political decision making. Most of these works apply production-system technology to construct choice models in for eign-policy decision contexts. In recent years, political applications have begun to diver sify. Today, lively research efforts flourish in widely varied application areas, such as computational text analysis, logic programming, computer learning, and conflict sim ulation. The works reviewed here constitute the early steps of a nascent program of study. Much remains to be accomplished. Nevertheless, the efforts conducted thus far suggest many potentially fruitful research avenues. Keywords: artificial intelligence, production systems, logic programming, computational hermeneutics, belief models, political simulation, political science.