Structuring Political Documents for Importance Ranking

Today's parliamentary information systems make political data available to the public in an effective and efficient way by moving from the classical document-centric model to a rich information-centric model for political data. We propose a novel approach to exploiting the rich information sources available through such parliamentary information systems for ranking results of a typical query for debates in accordance with their importance, for which we have developed several proxies. Our initial evaluation indicates that debate intensity and key players have an important role in signaling the importance of a debate.