Greene, DerekDerekGreeneCross, James P.James P.Cross2015-06-172015-06-172015 ACM2015-07-01http://hdl.handle.net/10197/6612ACM Web Science 2015, 28 June - 1 July 2015, Oxford, UKThis study analyzes political interactions in the European Parliament (EP) by considering how the political agenda of the plenary sessions has evolved over time and the manner in which Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have reacted to external and internal stimuli when making Parliamentary speeches. It does so by considering the context in which speeches are made, and the content of those speeches. To detect latent themes in legislative speeches over time, speech content is analyzed using a new dynamic topic modeling method, based on two layers of matrix factorization. This method is applied to a new corpus of all English language legislative speeches in the EP plenary from the period 1999- 2014. Our findings suggest that the political agenda of the EP has evolved significantly over time, is impacted upon by the committee structure of the Parliament, and reacts to exogenous events such as EU Treaty referenda and the emergence of the Euro-crisis have a significant impact on what is being discussed in Parliament.en© 2015 ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci '15) , (2015) http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2786451.2786464Content analysisDynamic topic modelingPolitical speechesCorporaConference Publication10.1145/2786451.27864642015-05-29https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ie/