Exploiting data from a parallel treebank recently developed for Italian, English and French, the paper discusses issues related to the development of a dependency-based alignment system. We focus on the alignment of linguistic expressions and constructions which are structurally different in the languages that have to be aligned, and on how to deal with them using dependency rather than constit...

Numerous scholars have documented a dramatic increase in incumbency advantage in US congressional elections and also state legislative elections over the past four decades.' For example, Gelman and King show that incumbents in the House of Representatives now receive about twelve extra percentage points solely as a result of holding congressional office during the campaign;' the comparable figu...

Despite their central role in the electoral process, constituency agents have been largely overlooked by political scientists and this article seeks to rectify the omission. It sketches the origins and development of the role of agent from the late nineteenth century and suggests that a serious re-think of the role took place in the 1990s. Survey-based evidence about the social characteristics ...

In this paper, we focus on the challenge of automatically converting a constituency treebank (source treebank) to fit the standard of another constituency treebank (target treebank). We formalize the conversion problem as an informed decoding procedure: information from original annotations in a source treebank is incorporated into the decoding phase of a parser trained on a target treebank dur...