Professor Kenneth Benoit
Areas of expertise
- Computational Linguistics 200402
- Natural Language Processing 080107
- Comparative Government And Politics 160603
- Applied Statistics 010401
Biography
Kenneth Benoit is Professor (Part-time) in the School of Politics and International Relations,and Professor of Computational Social Science in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has previously held positions in the Department of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin and at the Central European University (Budapest).
He received his Ph.D. (1998) from Harvard University, Department of Government.
His current research focuses on computational, quantitative methods for processing large amounts of textual data, mainly political texts and social media. Current interest span from the analysis of big data, including social media, and methods of text mining. His substantive research in political science focuses on comparative party competition, the European Parliament, electoral systems, and the effects of campaign spending. His other methodological interests include general statistical methods for the social sciences, especially those relating to measurement. Recent data large-scale measurement projects in which he has been involved include estimating policy positions of political parties through crowd-sourced data, expert surveys, manifesto coding, and text analysis.
Publications
- Benoit, K, Watanabe, K, Wang, H et al. 2018, 'quanteda: An R package for the quantitative analysis of textual data', The Journal of Open Source Software, vol. 3, no. 30, pp. 1-4pp.
- Mullen, L, Benoit, K, Keyes, O et al. 2018, 'Fast, Consistent Tokenization of Natural Language Text ', The Journal of Open Source Software, vol. 3, no. 23, pp. 1-3pp.
- Amador Diaz Lopez, J, Collignon-Delmar, S, Benoit, K et al. 2017, 'Predicting the Brexit Vote by Tracking and Classifying Public Opinion Using Twitter Data', Statistics, Politics, and Policy, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 85-104.
- Schwarz, D, Traber, D & Benoit, K 2017, 'Estimating Intra-Party Preferences: Comparing Speeches to Votes', Political Science Research and Methods, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 379-396pp.
- Welbers, K, Van Atteveldt, W & Benoit, K 2017, 'Text Analysis in R', Communication Methods and Measures, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 245-265pp.
- Nulty, P, Theocharis, Y, Popa, S et al. 2016, 'Social media and political communication in the 2014 elections to the European Parliament', Electoral Studies, vol. 44, pp. 429-444pp.
- Benoit, K, Conway, D, Lauderdale, B et al. 2016, 'Crowd-Sourced Text Analysis: Reproducible and Agile Production of Political Data', American Political Science Review, vol. 110, no. 2, pp. 278-295.
- Benoit, K 2015, 'quanteda: Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data (R package)'.
- Herzog, A & Benoit, K 2015, 'The Most Unkindest Cuts: Speaker Selection and Expressed Government Dissent during Economic Crisis', Journal of Politics, vol. 77, no. 4, pp. 1157-1175pp.
- Laver, M & Benoit, K 2015, 'The basic arithmetic of legislative decisions', American Journal of Political Science, vol. 59, no. 2, pp. 275-291pp.