Parliament Pulse — Methodology
This page documents the legacy classification pipeline and its thresholds. Its results are currently withheld: a mutable review flag or confidence score is not a signed, generation-bound publication grant.
The pipeline, step by step
- 1. Allowlisted collection. Every few hours we ingest articles from a fixed allowlist of established Kenyan outlets — the Nation, The Standard, The Star, People Daily, Citizen Digital, NTV Kenya, K24, KTN News, KBC and Business Daily — plus the official YouTube channels of those newsrooms. Nothing outside the allowlist is ever ingested; speculative blogs are permanently excluded; and extending the list is a reviewed code change, not an editor toggle.
- 2. Parliament-relevance gate. The classifier scores each item 0.0–1.0 for how much it is actually about the Parliament of Kenya. Items scoring below 0.4 are auto-rejected before anything else happens (the rejection reason is retained for audit). Items admitted from weaker collection signals are additionally held until a relevance verdict confirms them.
- 3. AI classification. Each surviving item is classified positive / neutral / negative with a score from −1.0 to +1.0 by an AI language model, instructed to handle sarcasm and mixed tone conservatively. The item also gets a subject hint (which member, Bill or institution it is mainly about).
- 4. Legacy review queue. The pipeline historically treated |score| ≥ 0.5 as eligible for automatic publication and sent other rows to an editor queue. That confidence rule does not establish publication authority; no classifications are now exposed by the public surface.
- 5. Entity linking with confidence triage. Candidate items are linked to the members, Bills and Acts they actually name, using deterministic name/title matching (no AI at this step). Historical confidence thresholds are retained for audit, but mutable links are not published.
- 6. Sample-size floor. The legacy analysis required at least 5 items before calculating an aggregate and labelled samples under 30 as small. This statistical floor is not a review or release grant, so the public dashboard remains withheld even above the floor.
Traceability
Candidate rows retain their source outlet, publication date and source URL for internal audit. Public results will require a typed evidence projection, independent counterchecks and an explicit release grant. Until then there are no public figures or item-level classifications to interpret.
Which sources we use
The current active allowlist as configured in this system:
- Citizen Digital (News website)
- Citizen TV Kenya (YouTube channel)
- K24 TV (YouTube channel)
- KBC Channel 1 (YouTube channel)
- KTN News (YouTube channel)
- KTN News Kenya (YouTube channel)
- Nation (News website)
- NTV Kenya (YouTube channel)
- People Daily (News website)
- People Daily TV (YouTube channel)
- The Standard (News website)
- The Star (News website)
- The Star Kenya (YouTube channel)
Topics tracked
- Agriculture
- Corruption & Accountability
- Devolution
- Economy & Taxation
- Education
- Governance & Constitution
- Healthcare
- Security
What this can and cannot tell you
It can tell you how allowlisted Kenyan newsrooms have been covering Parliament and its business, and how that tone shifts over time. It cannot tell you what Kenyans think, how popular anyone is, or how a vote would go — it is not a survey, has no sampling frame, and should never be quoted as “public opinion” or “approval”. Corrections are welcome via Contact.