arXiv:2511.13238cs.LGcs.AI2025-11中稿 · publication in Qua…综述被引 2

系统梳理25种文本政治立场估算算法,帮研究者选对工具。

Computational Measurement of Political Positions: A Review of Text-Based Ideal Point Estimation Algorithms

  • 按文本变异生成、捕捉与聚合方式分类算法,构建可比框架。
  • 发现不同算法结果差异本身有价值,需系统基准测试。
  • 为政治学、传播学等领域的实证研究提供方法选型指南。

本文首次系统回顾了无监督与半监督的计算文本理想点估计(CT-IPE)算法,这些方法旨在从议会演讲、政党纲领和社交媒体文本中推断潜在政治立场。过去二十年间,其发展紧随自然语言处理趋势,从词频模型演进至大语言模型(LLMs)。尽管方法工具箱不断扩展,但领域碎片化严重,缺乏系统比较与应用指导。通过系统文献检索,识别出25种CT-IPE算法,并进行人工内容分析其建模假设与发展背景。基于新提出的概念框架,区分算法如何生成、捕捉与聚合文本变异,归纳出四类方法:词频、主题建模、词嵌入与基于LLM的方法。本文批判性评估各方法在假设合理性、可解释性、可扩展性与局限性方面的表现。贡献有三:一是结构化综述二十年算法演进,厘清方法间关联;二是转化为实践指南,揭示透明度、技术要求与验证策略间的权衡;三是强调算法间估计结果差异具有信息量,亟需系统基准测试。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

This article presents the first systematic review of unsupervised and semi-supervised computational text-based ideal point estimation (CT-IPE) algorithms, methods designed to infer latent political positions from textual data. These algorithms are widely used in political science, communication, computational social science, and computer science to estimate ideological preferences from parliamentary speeches, party manifestos, and social media. Over the past two decades, their development has closely followed broader NLP trends -- beginning with word-frequency models and most recently turning to large language models (LLMs). While this trajectory has greatly expanded the methodological toolkit, it has also produced a fragmented field that lacks systematic comparison and clear guidance for applied use. To address this gap, we identified 25 CT-IPE algorithms through a systematic literature review and conducted a manual content analysis of their modeling assumptions and development contexts. To compare them meaningfully, we introduce a conceptual framework that distinguishes how algorithms generate, capture, and aggregate textual variance. On this basis, we identify four methodological families -- word-frequency, topic modeling, word embedding, and LLM-based approaches -- and critically assess their assumptions, interpretability, scalability, and limitations. Our review offers three contributions. First, it provides a structured synthesis of two decades of algorithm development, clarifying how diverse methods relate to one another. Second, it translates these insights into practical guidance for applied researchers, highlighting trade-offs in transparency, technical requirements, and validation strategies that shape algorithm choice. Third, it emphasizes that differences in estimation outcomes across algorithms are themselves informative, underscoring the need for systematic benchmarking.

政治计算文本分析理想点估计方法综述

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