SIFT – A language technology toolkit to assess the print media coverage of new forms of governance

Abstract

For social scientists, it is increasingly important to explore large text collections without time-consuming human intervention. We are presenting a language technology tool kit that allows researchers of the NCCR Democracy Module 1 to extract information on various forms of governance from a comprehensive multilingual corpus. The tool kit called SIFT allows searching for governance entities and measuring their salience, tonality, issue context and media frames. In substantial terms, our tool pipeline enables scholars of governance to extend their research focus to the previously neglected area of the public communication of democratic legitimacy and accountability of various forms of governance.