Memo from Professor Junko Kato of the Graduate School of Law and Politics, The University of Tokyo

 

Professor Kosuke Imai (Government and Statistics. Harvard University) will be delivering the 4th Center for Advanced Interdisciplinary Research Seminar 

 

Title: Automated Coding of Political Campaign Advertisement Videos: An Empirical Validation Study

 

Abstract: Television advertisements play an essential role in modern political campaigns with several billion dollars spent in the 2018 general election alone. For over two decades, researchers have studied TV ads by analyzing the hand-coded data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project (WAP) and its successor, the Wesleyan Media Project (WMP). Unfortunately, manually coding more than a hundred of variables, such as issue mentions, opponent appearance, and negativity, for many videos is a laborious and expensive process. We propose to automatically code campaign advertisement videos. Applying state-of-the-art machine learning methods, we extract various audio and image features from each video file. We show that our machine coding is at least as accurate as human coding for many variables of the WAP/WMP data sets. Since many candidates make their advertisement videos available on the Internet, automated coding can dramatically improve the efficiency and scope of campaign advertisement research. 

 

The paper is available from https://imai.fas.harvard.edu/research/campvideo.html

 

Date and Time: June 13  Thursday 13：30〜15：30

 

Venue School of Law Building,　Room 203　     The University of Tokyo (Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo

https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/campusmap/cam01_01_06_j.html

 

The talk will be given in English: The discussion can be conducted in both English and Japanese.