Helping people to choose for whom to vote: a web information system for the 2009 European elections

We demonstrate a web information system created for the European elections in June 2009. Based on their speeches in the EU parliament and their written questions, we created language models for each of the 736 members of the EU parliament. These language models were used to search for politicians responsible for a given topic, similar to expert search applications. Users prefer to see some kind of evidence for returning a hit after a search. We created a profile of each EU parlementarian by comparing her personal language model to the language model created from all EU parlementarians. The top 50 words best separating the individual from the avarage were shown as a wordcloud. These top 50 words and their scores were derived from a parsimonious language model.