# Studying Lobby Influence in the European Parliament

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.11381 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11381/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

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- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01759/) (2016)
- [Supervised Learning of Universal Sentence Representations from Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02364/) (2017)
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- [Unsupervised Learning of Sentence Embeddings using Compositional n-Gram Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02507/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a method based on natural language processing (NLP), for studying the influence of interest groups (lobbies) in the law-making process in the European Parliament (EP). We collect and analyze novel datasets of lobbies' position papers and speeches made by members of the EP (MEPs). By comparing these texts on the basis of semantic similarity and entailment, we are able to discover interpretable links between MEPs and lobbies. In the absence of a ground-truth dataset of such links, we perform an indirect validation by comparing the discovered links with a dataset, which we curate, of retweet links between MEPs and lobbies, and with the publicly disclosed meetings of MEPs. Our best method achieves an AUC score of 0.77 and performs significantly better than several baselines. Moreover, an aggregate analysis of the discovered links, between groups of related lobbies and political groups of MEPs, correspond to the expectations from the ideology of the groups (e.g., center-left groups are associated with social causes). We believe that this work, which encompasses the methodology, datasets, and results, is a step towards enhancing the transparency of the intricate decision-making processes within democratic institutions.