Behind the Guardian’s analysis of 100 years of MPs’ language on immigration

Methodology: how we trained a machine learning model to analyse rhetoric on immigration in the UK parliament over the course of a century The Guardian has revealed a significant rightward shift toward sentiment relating to immigration among MPs speaking in the House of Commons in the past five years. To do this analysis the Guardian’s Data Science and Data Projects teams, in collaboration with University College London, developed an in-house machine learning model to measure linguistic se...

By Carmen Aguilar García, Anna Vissens, Alice Thornewill von Essen, Tom Ravalde and Pamela Duncan