# Measuring the Quality of Answers in Political Q&As with Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.08816 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08816/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [A Primer in BERTology: What we know about how BERT works](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12327/) (2020)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [Efficient Natural Language Response Suggestion for Smart Reply](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00652/) (2017)
- [Introduction to Neural Transfer Learning with Transformers for Social Science Text Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02111/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This article proposes a new approach for assessing the quality of answers in political question-and-answer sessions. We measure the quality of an answer based on how easily and accurately it can be recognized in a random set of candidate answers given the question's text. This measure reflects the answer's relevance and depth of engagement with the question. Like semantic search, we can implement this approach by training a language model on the corpus of observed questions and answers without additional human-labeled data. We showcase and validate our methodology within the context of the Question Period in the Canadian House of Commons. Our analysis reveals that while some answers have a weak semantic connection to questions, hinting at some evasion or obfuscation, they are generally at least moderately relevant, far exceeding what we would expect from random replies. We also find a meaningful correlation between answer quality and the party affiliation of the members of Parliament asking the questions.