Superwahljahr 1994 and its effects on the German party system
The Bundestag election of 1994 took place in an unusual context: that of ‘Superwahljahr’ and was the most exciting in terms of uncertainty that there had been for at least 25 years. The causes of the lack of electoral uncertainty in the history of the Federal Republic are analysed. The reasons for this uncertainty: historical, institutional and party‐political, are explored in this article.
The German Party System: Eternal Crisis?
Ever since the early years of the Federal Republic, the German debate about political parties and the party system has been almost obsessed with the theme of crisis. Contrary to what seems to be the dominant view from within Germany, this article argues that, by and large, the German party system has performed well. Gordon Smith's centrality thesis can explain why this has been the case. However, there are indications that the future may not be so benign.
Automatic classification of TV news articles based on telop character recognition
The purpose of this study is to develop a multimedia database system for TV news video data. TV news video data consist of speech, characters and images. In this study, telop characters are recognized and given to the news articles as indices for classification. At first, telop frames which include telop characters are detected and then the telop characters are extracted and recognized. Through morphological analysis of the recognized telop characters, keywords are extracted which consist of more than two characters. Their keywords are used as indices to classify the TV news articles. We carried out experiments for 30 days of NHK 5 minutes news and obtained 95.4% telop character extraction rate, 81.4% character recognition rate and 83.8% article classification rate. We improved the article classification rate by 43.4% through character recognition improvement from 44.1% to 81.4%.