James P. Cross

Span-Based Constituency Parsing with a Structure-Label System and Provably Optimal Dynamic Oracles.

Parsing accuracy using efficient greedy transition systems has improved dramatically in recent years thanks to neural networks. Despite striking results in dependency parsing, however, neural models have not surpassed state-of-the-art approaches in constituency parsing. To remedy this, we introduce a new shift-reduce system whose stack contains merely sentence spans, represented by a bare minimum of LSTM features. We also design the first provably optimal dynamic oracle for constituency parsing, which runs in amortized O(1) time, compared to O(n^3) oracles for standard dependency parsing. Training with this oracle, we achieve the best F1 scores on both English and French of any parser that does not use reranking or external data.

Incremental Parsing with Minimal Features Using Bi-Directional LSTM

Recently, neural network approaches for parsing have largely automated the combination of individual features, but still rely on (often a larger number of) atomic features created from human linguistic intuition, and potentially omitting important global context. To further reduce feature engineering to the bare minimum, we use bi-directional LSTM sentence representations to model a parser state with only three sentence positions, which automatically identifies important aspects of the entire sentence. This model achieves state-of-the-art results among greedy dependency parsers for English. We also introduce a novel transition system for constituency parsing which does not require binarization, and together with the above architecture, achieves state-of-the-art results among greedy parsers for both English and Chinese.

Everyone’s a winner (almost): Bargaining success in the Council of Ministers of the European Union

This paper examines member state bargaining success in legislative negotiations in the European Union. Bargaining success is thought to be determined by factors attributable to intervention behaviour, relative policy positions and power. Intervention relates to a member state’s efforts to make its position known over the course of negotiations, relative policy positions relate to a member state’s position in the policy space under negotiation relative to other actors’ positions, and power refers to the size of the member state. New measures for bargaining success are introduced that account for the saliency of the legislative proposals under consideration. The results presented suggest that there are more winners than losers when measuring bargaining success.

Interventions and negotiation in the Council of Ministers of the European Union

Making interventions during negotiations within the Council of Ministers is the primary way in which member states make their policy positions known to one another and attempt to influence negotiations. In spite of this, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the factors that influence a member state’s decision to intervene. This paper seeks to address this gap in our understanding by analysing a new data set that specifies which member states are intervening and at what level of negotiation within the Council they are doing so. Significant differences between member state intervention behaviour are observed, and these differences can be explained to some degree by structural characteristics of the policy space within which member states negotiate.

Striking a pose : transparency and position taking in the Council of the European Union

In recent years, transparency (or the lack thereof) has become a central concern of the European Union and its attempts to increase the democratic legitimacy of the legislative decision-making process. The claim regularly made is that increasing transparency increases the potential for holding decision makers to account. This study investigates the manner in which transparency in the decision-making process affects the policy positions taken by negotiators at the outset of negotiations. The findings presented suggest that increasing transparency tends to lead to polarisation of negotiations, with negotiators taking more extreme positions when they know that their positions can be observed by outside parties. The implication of this result is that advocates of transparency should be aware that there is an inherent trade-off between increasing transparency, on the one hand, and increasing the incentives to grandstand during negotiations, on the other.

Openness and censorship in the European Union: An interrupted time series analysis

This study examines transparency and censorship in the Council of Ministers of the European Union from 1999 to 2009. We measure transparency by considering the timeliness of record release and the levels of censorship applied to records when (and if) they are released. We show that legislation introduced in 2001 (Regulation 1049) triggered a massive shift towards greater transparency, in line with its intention. However, we also show that the trend towards greater transparency has been interrupted by the enlargement rounds in 2004 and 2007. We attribute this fact to inexperience on the part of the new member states and the resulting need for censorship while these states adjusted to the negotiation styles in the Council.

Legislative amendments and informal politics in the European Union: A text reuse approach:

The ability to amend legislative proposals introduced by the Commission is central to legislative process in the European Union. Despite this, very few attempts have been made to capture and explain such amendments. This study addresses this gap in the literature by considering the changes between the Commission’s proposals and the final legislative outcome passed by the European Union. It does so by implementing minimum edit distance algorithms to measure changes between legislative proposals and outcomes. The findings suggest that legislative amendments are determined by the formal and informal institutional structures in which negotiations take place and characteristics of the proposal itself. Our conclusions contribute to the ongoing debate on the nature and distribution of legislative powers in the European Union.

Not all Treaties are Created Equal: The Effects of Treaty Changes on Legislative Efficiency in the EU†

One of the key motives behind recent reforms of the EUs legislative process has been to increase efficiency. This study examines whether the Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon treaties have successfully increased the speed with which the EU creates new laws. An interrupted time series approach is utilized to detect the total effects of treaty change on the decision‐making process. This study thus complements existing research on the effects of decision‐making rules, by employing a design more robust to the challenge of endogeneity. The findings suggest that the Amsterdam treaty was very successful at increasing legislative efficiency. In contrast, the Nice treaty does not appear to have had a notable impact, and, more interestingly, neither does the Lisbon treaty.

Unveiling the Political Agenda of the European Parliament Plenary: A Topical Analysis

This study analyzes political interactions in the European Parliament (EP) by considering how the political agenda of the plenary sessions has evolved over time and the manner in which Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have reacted to external and internal stimuli when making Parliamentary speeches. It does so by considering the context in which speeches are made, and the content of those speeches. To detect latent themes in legislative speeches over time, speech content is analyzed using a new dynamic topic modeling method, based on two layers of matrix factorization. This method is applied to a new corpus of all English language legislative speeches in the EP plenary from the period 1999-2014. Our findings suggest that the political agenda of the EP has evolved significantly over time, is impacted upon by the committee structure of the Parliament, and reacts to exogenous events such as EU Treaty referenda and the emergence of the Euro-crisis have a significant impact on what is being discussed in Parliament.