# Legislator Representation Learning with Social Context and Expert Knowledge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.03881 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03881/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [Masked Label Prediction: Unified Message Passing Model for Semi-Supervised Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03509/) (2020)
- [Residual Gated Graph ConvNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07553/) (2017)
- [Sampling the News Producers: A Large News and Feature Data Set for the Study of the Complex Media Landscape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10124/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [KCD: Knowledge Walks and Textual Cues Enhanced Political Perspective Detection in News Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04046/) (2022)
- [KALM: Knowledge-Aware Integration of Local, Document, and Global Contexts for Long Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04105/) (2022)
- [A Greek Parliament Proceedings Dataset for Computational Linguistics and Political Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12883/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modeling the ideological perspectives of political actors is an essential task in computational political science with applications in many downstream tasks. Existing approaches are generally limited to textual data and voting records, while they neglect the rich social context and valuable expert knowledge for holistic evaluation. In this paper, we propose a representation learning framework of political actors that jointly leverages social context and expert knowledge. Specifically, we retrieve and extract factual statements about legislators to leverage social context information. We then construct a heterogeneous information network to incorporate social context and use relational graph neural networks to learn legislator representations. Finally, we train our model with three objectives to align representation learning with expert knowledge, model ideological stance consistency, and simulate the echo chamber phenomenon. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our learned representations successfully advance the state-of-the-art in three downstream tasks. Further analysis proves the correlation between learned legislator representations and various socio-political factors, as well as bearing out the necessity of social context and expert knowledge in modeling political actors.