# Comparing Architectures for Supervised Political Scaling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01464 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01464/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [DeBERTaV3: Improving DeBERTa using ELECTRA-Style Pre-Training with Gradient-Disentangled Embedding Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09543/) (2021)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13663/) (2024)
- [mGTE: Generalized Long-Context Text Representation and Reranking Models for Multilingual Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19669/) (2024)
- [Whitening Sentence Representations for Better Semantics and Faster Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15316/) (2021)
- [On the Emergence of Position Bias in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01951/) (2025)
- [Political Text Scaling Meets Computational Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06217/) (2019)
- [Optimizing text representations to capture (dis)similarity between political parties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11989/) (2022)
- [Additive manifesto decomposition: A policy domain aware method for understanding party positioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10136/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text scaling, the task of positioning political actors on an ideological scale, is a fundamental task in political analysis. To ease the need for manual analysis, various NLP methods have been proposed for this task, including classification- and regression-based approaches, showing successes as well as limitations. The goal of our paper is to consolidate the state of the art in this area. We ask two questions: (a) Can the performance of scaling methods be improved by predicting scales not individually but jointly? (b) Is there a middle ground between classification and regression?