You can subscribe to TheyWorkForYou’s alerts to receive email updates on representatives’ parliamentary speeches and questions — but they’re also strongly used by civil society as a parliamentary monitoring tool, letting organisations know when their topics of interest have been mentioned in debates or votes. Our alerts help the flow of information from Parliament through government and wider civil society. 

Something we’ve wanted to do for a while is make it easier to create these keyword alerts. To cover all variants of a concept or topic,  you previously needed to create a search using operators (‘cars’ + ‘vehicles’), and as a result very few people did this. 

We’ve made a new interface for email alerts. This:

• makes it easier to create more complicated alerts
• can sometimes suggest useful phrases to include
• lets you see recent hits on alerts on the website as well as your inbox.

Creating more complicated alerts

Previously, you would need to do a search for (“electric vehicle” OR “electric car”) and then convert this into an alert. You can still do it that way if you want,  but we have a new interface to make it easier to make more complete queries. 

From the alerts page, you can create a new alert, and add a list of phrases.

When you’ve made an alert, it will give you the option to see the results and any recent matches to check it’s picking up what you want, and if not,  go back and adjust the terms used. 

Suggesting useful phrases

Sometimes you might not know the term that is commonly used in Parliament. We’ve done some data-crunching to try and help out here. 

Using vector search, we’ve created a list of related terms based on common previous searches and matches in the transcripts. For instance, below a search for ‘electric vehicle’ you’ll see suggestions including ‘electric car’ and ‘ev’: other terms for the same concept that have been used in Parliament in the past.  

This is not comprehensive and is initially focused on the most common terms — but is part of our approach to incorporating benefits from machine learning tools in a sustainable way into our services.

Viewing and managing alerts

Another thing we have done is make it easier to manage a greater range of alerts — and see recent mentions in the browser rather than purely in emails. 

You can now see, at a glance, any hits that have happened in the previous week, in the alerts management page, and expand it to see the last mention and get a link to the latest results. 

Stay up to date

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Header photo by Patrícia Nicoloso on Unsplash