Predicting Political Party Affiliation in the Swedish Parliament using Natural Language Processing

Sammanfattning

Text classification is a fundamental part of natural language processing. In this thesis, methods for text classification are used in an attempt to predict the political party affiliation of members of parliament (MPs). The objective is to evaluate the performance of Support Vector Machines (SVM), naive Bayes, and a fine-tuned Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model in predicting MPs' political party affiliation based on speeches given in the Chamber of the Swedish Parliament. This study shows that BERT outperforms SVM and naive Bayes in correctly classifying MPs, and SVM makes better predictions than naive Bayes and performs reasonably well compared to BERT. The results show that all models correctly predict MPs representing the Sweden Democrats to the highest degree. Both BERT and SVM roughly classify every other speech correctly, which implies much better than making random predictions. These results indicate the potential use of methods for automatically classifying political speeches.