competition

So, I’m no longer the only one using machine learning in order to measure democracy - I just found out about this initiative. It looks interesting and it made me regret not going to APSA this year. We differ in tools (they use SVM, I use a combination of LSA, LDA, decision trees, and Wordscores) and texts (they use human rights reports and Freedom House reports, I use 6,043 newspapers and magazines), but the spirit is the same: producing measures that are more transparent and reproducible (and eventually maybe real-time).